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

Photo: Black Peppa The last time we heard Coventry performer Duke Keats was on last year’s sprawling jazz-funk live recorded odyssey, ‘Dirty Glamour’. His latest single ‘Heavy Heartbreak’ is a large-scale departure from 2023’s EP, finding the artist distilling his many varied and wide-ranging influences into an astonishingly ace dreamy radio-made bop. Photo: Black Peppa An upbeat summery synth and bass powered alt-pop tune spliced with words that look back misty eyed and fondly on an innocent former love, alluding to the ample pain that comes from reminiscing, Keats has penned a Passion Pit st ..read more

Photo: @philinevandenhul We’ll admit our ignorance and state that before writing this review we admit to being ill informed of the Dutch music scene and couldn’t even place Groningen, Real Farmer’s home town, on the map. But since completing our homework our audio world has been brightened up due to Personal Trainer, The Klittens, Frontsector, Youth Deprivation, to name a few (check out the God Is In The TV interview from January for more recommendations from the group) and the emergence of this DIY punk-ish quartet from the country’s diverse music scene makes magnificent sense. To paint Real ..read more

The new one from Death Of The High Street sees the Midlands lads in sheer, seething, all-out rock mode with heavy punk riffs and an honest exposition of the wild intricacies involved in addressing your mental health. Beginning proceedings in the therapist’s office, a story unfolds of youthful bad decisions, unravelling sanity, toxic comparison and regret. Single artwork: @charliefox069 ‘Mental Wealth’ wields Green Day guitars and persistent drumming to craft a sensitively put, warts and all deep dive into psychiatric breakdown, illustrating the subject with poetic finesse in lines such as “I ..read more