Now David James Allen has returned with brand new single ‘Dukes Up (Since You’ve Been Gone)’. Taking some inspiration from Frederick Knight’s ‘I’ve Been Lonely (For So Long)’, the track adopts a sunny tone for what is essentially a statement of defiance. A vow to confront life’s struggles head on, standing on your own two feet, fists raised and ready for anything. The sound is suitably rich and assured, with layers of guitars, bass, drums and electric piano, alongside organ from Andrew Ivens, building into something of a buoyant momentum. “On the surface, ‘Dukes Up (Since You’ve Been Gone)’ sounds like a breakup song, but I think of it more as a departure song,” Allen explains. “It’s not about any one person. It’s about those moments in life when someone you’ve relied on is suddenly gone, and you’re forced to learn how to navigate the world on your own.”

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So far singles ‘River of Love’ and the title track have introduced The End of the Road, both songs highlighting Sawrey’s ability to conjure narrative depth within relatively short spaces of time. Take the latter, a reflective track which drew on a pair of real world memories (a camping trip to Vermont back in 1976 and the loss of an old friend) to “paint a picture of a man at the dead of night,” as we put it. “A person lost in the wilderness or else the dark twists of his own head and confessing as much as plainly as he knows how.”

With the record now out, Hadnot Creek has shared ‘Thirty One’ as a final single, and the track serves as the embodiment of everything achieved across the record. An entire life distilled into nine short verses. A life ended prematurely, granted, but an entire life nonetheless. The concision of Sawrey’s lyricism typical of the deceptive depth which runs through his work. A style that’s mirrored in the sound itself, with what at first appears a relatively stripped back folk arrangement blooming into something which rich and intricate.

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To further raise the anticipation for the record, Scott C Park has now shared the album’s title track. Revival serves as a meditation on ideas of identity and faith, as well as the role of creativity in underpinning or challenging such things, and the new single pushes deeper than ever into these thematic concerns. Park’s childhood was spent in the church on the Isle of Lewis, meaning the word revival, in a spiritual sense, has serious resonance, though the song shows how he is setting out to reimagine the definition, at least in his own head, in part as an act of respect towards his younger self. “I’m reclaiming the term for my own story,” Park explains. “The revival I experienced while making this record was a return to the thirteen-year-old me who just wanted to write songs and play rock and roll.”

Which is not to say the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. Because while Park pushes against the strictures of the church, his exploration never feels purely critical. Rather, he treats his experiences with equal parts curiosity and compassion, acknowledging his own identity and beliefs with claiming they hold any higher value than those of anyone else. And the song has real emotional heft too, growing from subdued restraint into something much bigger, evoking a sense of melancholy majesty as the acoustic drums kick in behind howls of distorted guitar.

Revival is set for release on the 14th August.

Photo by Danielle MacLeod

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Back in May we shared an updated version of Hayman, Watkins, Trout And Lee, a bluegrass record which combined original material with covers of genre classics, and hinted that the release might be the start of a wider project to unearth the full depth of Darren Hayman’s substantial back catalogue and reinvigorate it for the digital age. This process has quietly continued across recent weeks. Previously missing titles from Hefner have reappeared via his own imprint Belka, as well as releases from The French, The Secondary Modern and his debut solo EP Cortinaland, meaning a long-needed sense of order is starting to emerge within Hayman’s online presence. The work of this kaleidoscopic and shape-shifting artist finally catalogued in one place.

But the crowning achievement of this mission is the release of an expanded edition of 2012’s The Violence. Among one of Darren Hayman’s most ambitious undertakings, The Violence is complex and emotionally resonant concept album centring on the English Civil War and the contemporaneous witch trials across East Anglia. With a sound brought to life by a vast ensemble of musicians going by the name The Long Parliament, the record digs right into the violence and superstitions of the period, tracing a country pulled apart by misplaced fervour, illusions of moral superiority, pernicious rumours and the old-fashioned desire for power. A society, that is, very different from our own, yet governed by familiar forces. One in which fear and ignorance curdle into something terrible, and act as a cover for those who wish to enact ideas of cruelty and greed. “The beliefs and fears that led to the Witch Trials are taken from the Puritan idea that it is wrong to glorify or look upon God’s image directly. Taken to its absolute extreme, only the blind were seen as truly pure, and ungodliness was perceived to be everywhere,” Hayman explains:

Evil never thinks of itself as such, and people can act cruelly when frightened. I assume that Matthew Hopkins, the self-named ‘Witch Finder General’ believed, on some level, that he was acting on God’s instruction. In early 1645, Hopkins pushed his ear to his window and overheard conversations between supposed witches. Elizabeth Clarke, a one-legged, 80-year-old widow, was the first to be accused and arrested.

Hopkins claimed that 3 days and nights of ‘watching’ led Elizabeth Clarke to ‘confess many things’; furthermore, that his interrogation witnessed the summoning of numerous hideous imps and demons. Clarke confessed to sleeping with the devil and also pointed the finger at other women in the parish, including Anne West and her daughter Rebecca. All of these women were single or widowed beggars and perceived to be a drain on their communities.

Hopkins began offering his services to other towns. For a fee, he would help rid these communities of their ‘witches’

The expanded edition of The Violence comes complete with its companion EP The Four Queens, plus several unreleased songs and demos. “It’s so important to me to have this record available again. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked, and I believe it sounds like nothing else in my back catalogue,” Hayman explains. “I write easily about modernity and pepper my lyrics with slang, brand names, and colloquialisms. I wanted to write about something in Essex’s past that spoke of its strangeness and also forced me to write in a language suitable for another period.”

The Violence (Expanded Edition) is out now and available from the Darren Hayman Bandcamp page.

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Released a year later, The Deadchrist pushed the jesus is a path to heaven project towards a more diverse palette while only deepening its thematic concerns. “There are elements of David Bazan in the religious guilt and fury of the lyrics, Sufjan Stevens in the soft vocals, as well as the likes of talons’ in the despondent quiet,” as our review noted, and the results was a sound able to embrace seemingly contradictory moods in one complete package. A feat inherently religious, where mortal insignificance and supernatural sublime collide into something doom-laden, unknowable and holding potential salvation. “The simultaneity of darkness and light is the spirit of the deadchrist,” we continued in our piece:

Take the pain and beauty of ‘the fawn’, where death is both an end and a beginning, or ‘lord, you called’ with its unique blend of optimism and torment. Hoban has described the jesus is the path to heaven project as one exploring the “effect religious trauma has on the human body,” though it stands apart in how it does this with such a direct engagement with Christian themes. Suffering as the central tenet of existence. Agony and love as the same thing.

This summer sees Hoban and co. return with brand new full-length Power !, and lead single ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ suggests a continued, ever-deepening engagement with this core aesthetic. If its predecessor could be said to have displayed marginally warmer or more personable strokes, ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ snaps back toward desolation. An expansive, brooding number which possesses an almost medieval air, tapping into ancient frameworks of fear and belief and dragging them into the contemporary moment. “The Lord has bled / from heart to heart, / down the Fall Line,” Hoban sings in the opening lines, his vocals appearing after five minutes of building instrumentation as though precipitating from the pregnant air. “The Lord has bled a line / a thousand miles across / the beltway of 40, / to the shoreline / where He found me.” As ever, there’s a devotional quality to the sound, though one which bends towards the apocalyptic, asking the question that seems most pertinent in the project’s entire body of work. What is it that lies at the end of the line drawn by the Lord, deliverance or damnation?

Album art buy Emily Warner

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Now Creekbed Carter Hogan is set to return with Peasants Revolt, a brand new full-length via Gar Hole Records which builds upon these beginnings to conjure their most ambitious and stylistically diverse release to date. Written within the span of an array of transitions, which saw Hogan undergoing gender affirming treatment and living/moving between the North and South while the entire world seemed to be lurching towards something newly frightening, the record embraces multiplicity as a kind of remedy. As though to refuse to be reduced to any one thing is to stand in opposition to the central tenets of capitalism and imperialism. To move beyond the confines of individual isolation and into a teeming world, and indeed a teeming history, full of radical potential.

Hence Peasants Revolt contains Medieval ballads and Appalachian strike songs, finds inspiration in everything from the Haitian Revolution to Ethiopian jazz. And, crucially, is far more than a solo record. The almost overwhelming community of collaborators includes Britton Beisenherz, Lindsey Verrill and Jeff Johnston (Little Mazarn), Carolina Chauffe (Hemlock), Beth Chrisman (Lost Patterns, Missy Beth and the Morning Afters, Willi Carlisle, James Hand), Nora Predey, Zack Wiggs, Sarah Schultz (Sun June), Hunter Prueger (Middle Sattre), Gabriela Torres, Jude Brothers and Hot Dog Choir. “Building such a rich world takes artists who understand music isn’t just ornamental,” as the album notes put it, “but fundamental to survival.”

To set the tone before the album’s release this summer, Creekbed Carter Hogan has shared the lead single, ‘Cutbank of Cleves’. Described by the label as “a rollicking, medieval-Americana fable sung by a jester in the halls of a dying empire,” the track embodies the spirit which runs through the entirity of Peasants Revolt. The sense that, though the world is falling all around, there has never been a better time to come to together. To create, to dance, to scheme, to fight. To refute those forces which have come to shape the dismal present, and to remember, in spite of everything, to still make space to live.

Watch the video by by Lexi Kiecker below:

Peasants Revolt will be released on the 24th July via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it from the Creekbed Carter Hogan Bandcamp page.

Album artwork by Jammy Violet

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I was going to a lot of churches and walking a lot and living in my head, and I found I was making this kind of personal folklore out of the things I encountered each day. I walked a pilgrimage and slept in churches over the middle of winter, and collected field recordings which became the backbone of this EP. One week I found three dead birds, so that became a symbol, or for a while I’d always cycle under this telephone pylon and each time I’d get an electric shock in the same hand. I wrote and photographed these things, recorded a lot of sounds, and mythologised a lot.

In a way the EP is another of those folklores, a mythology I wrapped around my own life so that when I looked out at it the colours were different. In another way it’s a true story, of a girl who meets a great sadness and then meets a mountain. In a way it’s a fairytale – filled with wolves and bells and river gods. It’s also about nature and the wild as a sacred and living thing, and of all things being connected in a small, and big, way. It’s messy and thick and bristling with sounds because of that.”

To celebrate the release of the EP, Josephine Illingworth has unveiled final single ‘Hail’, and there is no better place to dive in. Because while each track is striking in its own right, Bright Things I Found In The Dark is essentially a story, and as with any story it is best to start at the beginning. This is the tale of a girl in a fictional land populated by wolf mothers, goddesses and great natural spectacles. One which features mysterious strangers, burgeoning loves, even its own cosmology. Think of ‘Hail’ as the origin story of this universe, then let yourself get swept away by the narrative.

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Now Anjali Rose is back with ‘Sovereignty’, her first new song in four years and one which applies the same level of nuance to the chaos of the contemporary moment. It’s stripped-back like a folk song, but so much more than that, flickering with electric charge and often dissipating behind ambient textures both hazy and ominous, with samples of things like gun shots punctuating the distortion. The song is “one’s woman’s experience of surviving in The United States in 2026,” as Anjali Rose herself puts it, and it’s clear the experience is as disorientating as it is dismaying. Her vocals snake like smoke through an atmosphere thick with turbulent intensity, delivering sparse, opaquely poetic lyrics that capture the sense of societal disarray perfectly. “This is my first release in four years,” she continues, “and the act of sharing it is in itself a practice of vulnerability, learning, momentum, and growth.”

You dont own me
And I am not this fear
More than a body
More than just these years

The single comes complete with a video filmed by SoundSolstice and Anjali Rose Kumar:

‘Sovereignty’ is out now and available via the Anjali Rose Bandcamp page.

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Lemoncello have now announced their brand new album Perfect Place, coming in May via Claddagh Records. The record has roots in a residency on the Skellig Islands off the southwest coast of Kerry, Quirke and Kinsella taking those ideas forward and working on them over a two year period, leading to what might be the pair’s most considered and emotionally daring songs to date. “In the past I think I’ve abandoned songs a little bit too soon,” as Quirke explains. “I hid behind flowery language instead of getting to the heart of the thing. With this album we wanted to express things that are difficult and messy. Sometimes to be clear emotionally you need to be abstract lyrically but you can’t be afraid to take everything off and just stand there completely vulnerable.”

Latest single ‘Articulate Animal’ suggests the entire release will be just as finely crafted and probing. A cello drone simmers just below the surface, the vocals delivering a single which repeats throughout the track. “Wish I could stop telling myself things.” Something like a mantra, a spell intended to cut to the quick of the self, hurdling over the rational part of the mind and sinking into the instinctive. As it progresses, the song blooms with subtle detail, but never moves too far from this core ideal. As though it is an act of careful effort, and something of a mission statement for an album determined to get the the real heart of things.

Watch the video below, directed by Saoirse Johnston Gaffey, produced by Billy Buckley with director of photography Leon Forristal:

Perfect Place will be released on the 8th May via Claddagh Records and you can pre-order it now. Lemoncello are heading out on an extensive tour across the UK in the coming months and you can find the list of dates below:

Wed 6 May – Glasgow, UK (Joshua Burnside support)
Thu 7 May – Leeds, UK (Joshua Burnside support)
Fri 8 May – The Jacaranda, Liverpool, UK (Album Launch Headline Show)
Sat 9 May – Stroud, UK (Joshua Burnside support)
Sun 10 May – London, UK (Joshua Burnside support)
Mon 11 May – Bristol, UK (Joshua Burnside support)
Tue 12 May – Theatreship, London, UK (Album Launch Headline Show)
29–31 May – Night & Day Festival, Roscommon, IE
24–26 July – Deer Shed Festival, UK
23–26 July – WOMAD Festival, UK

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Now the pair are set to release This Is What It Feels Like, the collaboration’s debut full-length album, to showcase the sound they have built together. Remarkably, Bauer and Whitlock only met in person when the record was already half completed, though far from hampering the intimacy and emotional connection of the music, this distance ultimately helped deepen it. “This project began as an exchange of demos and became a deeply personal dialogue,” Whitlock explains, the remove of the pair dialling into the themes of isolation, bonding and longing which marks so many of the tracks.

Latest single ‘Do You Think Of It Sometimes?’ serves as the ideal introduction to the project for anyone still unfamiliar. If the album sees Memory Spells and Jordan Whitlock evoke the various fragilities of any relationship, then this single brings to life the chronic ache suffered by any yearning heart. Part memory, part dream, the song captures the transience of any given moment, and the nostalgia which builds around love even within the present. As though even the most beautiful of moments carry their own melancholic barb, the knowledge that time will pass haunting every day of our lives.

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