Latest single ‘Ana Bas Saktalak’ sees Nancy Mounir utilise Theremin and violin to support the vocals of Fatma Serry, conjuring a world both eerie and stark. An atmosphere fitting for Serry’s alluringly vengeful words. “Your day will come,” she sings. “You’ll beg for us to reunite but I will refuse,” an unforgiving spirit roused from its place in the past, her fury no less fervent or searing.

Nozhet El Nofous is out on the 3rd June via Simsara Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Photo by Eslam Abd El Salam

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Back in February, we wrote about Dana Gavanski‘s forthcoming album When It Comes on Full Time Hobby, describing the record as “more unguarded and ambitious than its predecessors.” With its delicately eerie tones, latest single ‘I Kiss The Night’ is another example of Gavanski’s commitment to sitting with vulnerability on the new record, practising an instinctive and honest examination which roots itself in the voice. It possesses a sense of hushed, late-night seclusion, that unique lonely feeling experienced only when it feels like the rest of the world has gone to bed. But far from an ominous experience, the song is “an ode to the night,” as Gavanski explains, “learning to lean into its magic, and the magic and spookiness of solitude in a winter storm.”

Fresh – Babyface

Writing of the single ‘Morgan & Joanne‘ back in December, we described a new positive side to London punx Fresh. The track, which displayed a willingness to subvert “traditional narratives to develop a truer picture of the queer experience,” held a distinctively upbeat, celebratory tone. The vibe might not always be so sunny and playful on new record Raise Hell, to be released this summer on Specialist Subject Records, but something of the brightness is retained on latest single ‘Babyface’. A song described by lead Kathryn Woods as “a cry for help masquerading as a pop song.”

FonFon Ru – Fatty Tissue Thorn

Ahead of their fourth record Collapse Of The Silver Bridge, out next week on Repeating Cloud, Maine trio FonFon Ru have shared latest single, ‘Fatty Tissue Thorn’. Barrelling headlong into the spiralling chaos of a hypochondriac mind, the track spikes its indie rock energy with an anxious post-punk needle, the building momentum falling somewhere between catharsis and catastrophe as it gathers its volatile motion. Check out the video directed by drummer Wes Sterrs below:

Collapse Of The Silver Bridge is out on the 15th April via Repeating Cloud and you can pre-order it now from the FonFon Ru Bandcamp page.

JoJo Worthington – The Divide

Based in Montreal, songwriter, composer and producer JoJo Worthington works at the intersection of pop, folk and ambient styles. Utilising an array of technological techniques to conjure songs both mysterious and intimate. Soundscapes as a kind of emotional geography. Latest single ‘The Divide’ turns its attention to the partisan nature of contemporary society, and how between the fervour and bombast of its extremes stretches a deep and lonely canyon. “You know in movies when there’s an earthquake and the earth splits open and it separates the protagonist and the love interest and then sometimes you see people fall in the gap?” Worthington asks. “[The song is] kinda about the people in the gap and trying to find a home there.”

When there’s so many delusions
When there are so many truths
Maybe I’m confused
Sometimes I don’t know what to think or do

Nancy Mounir – Khafif Khafif

Described as “a remarkable communion with ghosts,” the debut record of Egyptian composer Nancy Mounir juxtaposes its microtonal and non-metered arrangements with recordings of artists from back in history. Titled Nozhet El Nofous (‘Promenade of the Souls’), the release is in dialogue with a different era of Arabic music, one before the dominant maqam (modal systems) were established and creativity reigned. First single ‘Khafif Khafif’ highlights the blend of haunting emotion and steely defiance which underpins Mounir’s work.

Nozhet El Nofous is out on the 3rd June via Simsara Records and you can order it now from the Nancy Mounir Bandcamp page.

Panda Riot – E.S.P.

This summer sees the return of Chicago‘s Panda Riot with a brand new album, Extra Cosmic, and lead single ‘E.S.P.’ throws listeners head first into their detailed yet immediate sound. After a period of experimenting with increasingly complex guitar pedal work, the song finds the band at their most intricate, but everything is tied together by an intuitive forward motion, a sense of release which lines up with the cathartic epiphany of the themes. “‘E.S.P.’ is a song about trying to connect with someone and never quite getting there,” the band explain. “Every time you think you’ve got it, you realize you’re still passing one another by and not quite syncing up.”

Extra Cosmic is out on the 10th June and you can pre-order it from the Panda Riot Bandcamp page.

Party of the Sun – Hymns Forgot

Despite having released new EP Capsule I barely a month ago, New Hampshire‘s psychedelic folk outfit Party of the Sun are not ones to rest on their laurels. Out via Trailing Twelve Records, latest single ‘Hymns Forgot’ is the most recent in a series of monthly releases, a self-described ‘nylon boogie’ which stitches together layers of bright guitars, shuffling percussion and lush harmonies to evoke an easy springtime warmth. Lyrically, the track explores an urban life removed from the peace of the natural world, and charts this disconnect through historic cultural violence. “Was it mine to take or yours to find?” they ask, “Maybe the one who chose to give it.”

Sailing down
Never would I have come
To the land devotion lost
Giving power to a sun

‘Hymns Forgot’ is out now via Trailing Twelve and available via streaming services.

Pet Deaths – swingtime

Following their acclaimed 2019 album to the top of the hill and roll…, London duo Pet Deaths return this spring with a brand new record, unhappy ending. The release takes inspiration from the likes of Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis to conjure an exploratory and colourful sound, a kind of spiritual freedom which carries the highly personal lyricism of lead Liam Karima beyond its immediate resonance. The result, as single ‘swingtime’ shows, is often intimate and surreal, something captured in the video by photographer Kulbir Thandi and Karima himself.

unhappy ending is out on the 27th May and available to per-order from the Pet Deaths Bandcamp page.

Rose Brokenshire – Better Now

Splitting the year into summers as a firefighter and winters making music, BC‘s Rose Brokenshire has learned to embrace larger rhythms within her work. The path has seen her develop her folk style into a more ambient-based sound, something patient and compassionate gained only through experience. Looking to accept the past in all its nuanced truth, latest single ‘Better Now’ utilises this wisdom to offer a salve against suffering. As though embracing the emotional volatility of life can provide its own balm. “I wanted to make something that honoured the journey of growth,” Brokenshire explains. “Something that expressed love for both the ups and downs, the light days and dark days, and the tools I found most healing during a more desolate chapter of my life.”

‘Better Now’ is available from the Rose Brokenshire Bandcamp page.

WILDES – Woman In Love

The first new release since 2020 EP Let You Go, London-based singer-songwriter WILDES has returned with single, ‘Woman in Love’. Taking inspiration from the defiant work of artists like PJ Harvey and Patti Smith, the track confronts suppressed emotions with an unerring eye. The vocals emerge through smoky layers of the sound with a searing honesty, what begins stripped-back and taut eventually blossoming into something lush and soulful. “‘Woman In Love’ is a song of anger,” she explains. “It’s all about the façade presented by someone who isn’t all that happy, and the rage that lies under the glassy exterior.” WILDES is here to crack the glass, to feel the empowerment of release.

Bitter memories, digging up the treasure I sunk
Love your enemy, maybe you can keep them infront
How would you know what I’ve seen, what I’ve done?
How would you know I’m a woman in love?

‘Woman in Love’ is out now and available on streaming services.

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— Omar El Akkad

Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar El Akkad has experience of human conflict. In his ten years writing for The Globe and Mail, El Akkad covered a diverse range of politically and socially-charged events, from the Arab Spring in Egypt and the US War in Afghanistan, to military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson. However, there must have been a sense of familiarity by the second and third events, each an example of ordinary people rising against injustices by systems with guns and armour. People made angry, and acting like angry people will.

His debut novel, American War, feels rooted in such understanding. A dystopic imagining of the Second American Civil War, the book takes place in the last quarter of the twenty-first century, each chapter followed by an excerpt from various sources of (fictional) non-fiction that provide the necessary exposition without drowning the narrative. And boy is such exposition needed. El Akkad’s America is one ravaged by climate change, great portions of the country too hot to inhabit or else underwater, while the entire Middle East is now the Bouazizi Empire, a prosperous and stable democracy. The United States are no longer united, north and south split into Blue and Red, a battle of brutal force and insidious insurgency amplified by new technology—cheap guns and IEDs joined by bio-warfare plagues and unmanned, solar-power drones gone haywire, dropping fire indiscriminately.

Perhaps understandably, much of the critical reception has focused on the novel’s link to the current political and cultural situation in the United States. With visible, bare-faced white supremacism joining the already copious amounts of insidious racism across the country, and the bipartisan split between right and left seemingly growing more conspicuous and developed by the day, the term ‘civil war’ has been bandied semi-seriously. The bottom line is that America represents different things to different people, so ‘being American’ has various conflicting and often incompatible definitions that makes any sort of peaceful middle ground seem not just fanciful but downright impossible. In a novel where rebel states in the South secede from the Union in order to continue the extraction of fossil fuels, and both sides are entrenched in the ideological righteousness of their position, parallels are always going to be drawn.

However, the real focus of the novel is not the ‘America’ of the title but the ‘War’—a fact made clear by the quote from El Akkad himself on the front cover (see the epigraph to the article). For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty. The American setting is just the method of grounding this facet of the human condition, marking it not as some geographical, cultural or religious trait but rather the product of suffering and trauma.

American War is out in the UK via Picador and the US through Knopf.

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