Because while the previous Jouska record Suddenly My Mind Is Blank was crafted from a notably polished electro pop, the new record sees Thorvik favour something more textured, wrapping raw emotion with a gauzy style. The result, as ‘Pierced’ shows, owes a debt to both dream pop and trip hop. A sound full of contradiction, somehow managing to conjure a sparse night time atmosphere without sacrificing any weight, and managing to pair emotional immediacy with an ambiguously dreamy drift.

This juxtaposition speaks to the track’s thematic concerns too. “This one grew out of a shame tied to being seen at all,” Thorvik describes. “I’ve always struggled with visibility. Part of me wants to be seen and heard; another part just wants to disappear. Artistry brings that tension to the surface. I often feel like I’m stepping into a role that doesn’t quite fit, exposing parts of myself I’d rather keep hidden. It feels too personal, too raw, and often uncomfortable. This song captures that feeling.”

Photo by Hans Olav Settem

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Now Nora Roy is back with ‘Fickle’, a brand new song which again offers an idiosyncratic style to better communicate things otherwise difficult to convey. There’s a decidedly introspective tone to the gentle indie pop sound, though one stretched strange at the edges by psych tones. What results is a kind of ethereal experience. As though having peered into the depths of one’s self, Roy reveals not some small, dark space but rather an expanse far wider and more mysterious than we might ever have expected.

‘Fickle’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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It was a release of impressive freedom and real promise, something Photokem are now looking to build on with the release of their second EP, Half Ton Pet. They released lead single, the warm and laidback acoustic pop song ‘Gillie’, a few weeks back, and have now followed up with the title track. Multilayered and poignant, the song brings together piano and electronic beats and Acheampong’s weary but affecting vocals. The result is something like a slightly more low-key and raw take on the kaleidoscopic pop of Justin Vernon’s later work, treading the line between melancholic and joyful as it snakes through peaks and troughs and moments of film-grained negative space.

Cover art by Julio Moreno

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The new track follows in this lineage. A love song which refuses the certainty so common to the genre to offer something more nuanced. So when Carlsson sings “I was the ocean and he was the moon / I tried to stay in place but he was gravity,” the impression is not one of grand gesture and romantic inevitability, but rather the sense of being exposed to mysterious forces. The physics of things larger than yourself, moving life beyond your control.

I was a cynical
He said he was one too
I called him silver
And I was blue

‘gravity’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Latest single ‘The Way’ is no less sincere in its intentions, a song about honesty and forgiveness written while estranged from close family. “This division taught me an important lesson on reconciliation,” Boesl explains. “Certainty leads to unkindness. Sometimes (most of the time?), we can be in our own way to growth.” But here they commit such a sentiment to an upbeat indie pop rhythm, repurposing the spiritual idea of ‘The Way’ to find a path back towards the mutual rewards of reunion.

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This mood extends right through to the band’s promotional material, the decidedly self-deprecative press release for brand new single ‘Perfume’ disavowing much of their back catalogue and promising little by way of improvement. But more than being a PR gimmick, the notes communicate something present within so many independent releases that most work to ignore. A sense of futility in an age where ‘content’ is fleeting and everywhere, and success is measured by gamified scores. That the dread and wit of ‘I Went Whaling’ has endured and leeched into every aspect of the Sister Wanzala project is hardly a surprise. Is it possible to attempt to create in such a climate without a good dose of each?

Described as the result of quality time spent with Cocteau Twins and Fleetwood Mac, ‘Perfume’ pushes the Sister Wanzala sound into its dreamiest space yet. A collision of unhurried textures and taut pop rhythms, like a mind trying to pull itself from a daydream which never quite seems to end. What emerges is Sister Wanzala at their most earnest in spite of everything, the track’s sleek longing indicating that some sense of possibility persists, even if it is perhaps against better judgement. “I want my dreams removed,” Patrick Wanzala-Ryan croons in the repeated refrain, but for now the prospect is on hold, the dreams remain intact.

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This month saw Worthitpurchase return with a brand new single on Anxiety Blanket Records, one which develops this style and shows a new dimension to the band too. Because ‘Inbetween’ is a deceptively simple song, one anchored by acoustic guitar to lend a stripped back intimacy as Rowe explores the worries and expectations of contemporary life. But the song develops into something richer as it progresses, a warmth which allows a certain comfort to emerge, and with it the conviction that things might turn out alright in the end.

I see no face in the mirror, then it reappears
Exterior is a hueless ghost and I’m the host
I’ll get there soon, I’ll be like you
I’ll get there soon, I’ll be like you

Inbetween / Themanwhofelltoearth is out now via Anxiety Blanket Records and is available from the Worthitpurchase Bandcamp page.

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With support from musicians such as Joseph Shabason (Destroyer), José Contreras (By Divine Right) Caylie Runciman (Boyhood) and Gavin Gardiner (The Wooden Sky), Bonnetta has crafted his most pop-inflected album to date. There is a distinct seventies feel, a certain atmosphere and depth of sound present across the record, despite its varied tones. The lush late-night heartache of ‘I Can Only Be Good’ blurs intimacy and isolation, memories sitting close to loneliness as Shabason’s saxophone snakes in languid turns, while ‘The Days Disintegrating’ sits in a slow slipstream of solitude and patters towards its langorous climax.

Others have a broader sound, vintage synthesizers and drum machines lending tracks such as ‘My Drugs, My Dreams’ a widescreen, technicolor heft. But for all of its richness, the themes of the track work in the opposite direction. “I wrote [‘My Drugs, My Dreams’] in my living room right after my breakup, totally terrified and alone,” Bonnetta explains. “Again, all these huge questions came back to me and I was so confused and drained. I’d just hurt this person that I loved and had loved for so long and who I had had all of these formative experiences with […] I wanted to remember it forever, to be present, to learn from it, and so drew the picture.”

Such a sentiment could describe much of the Evening Hymns oeuvre. Not wallowing in sorrow and confusion but engaging with them in curiosity. Like holding loss in your palm and seeing how it catches the light. “I’d always had this feeling that love should feel good wherever you are, in some idyllic place or in some run-down miserable apartment. I wanted to be happy with nothing. To take away my vices and my dreams and still feel free and hopeful and capable of love.”

Like previous Evening Hymns records, Heavy Nights feels like a space carved out from the normal passage of things. Remoteness repurposed as a form of contemplation, an opportunity to learn. Loneliness not as an end but the means, the stark shadow of the relationships that have been becoming things to be studied and remembered in order to love once again. The result is a record fitting of its name. A descent into the end of something meaningful, and a conscious decision to shoulder whatever heavy truths are found there, all woven from the rich and romantic hues of the early hours, where feelings achieve a new saturation as the lights burn lazy and low.

We took the opportunity to ask Bonnetta a few questions to learn a little more about the record and his creative processes more generally.

Hi Jonas, I hope all is well and things are shaping up for the record. Could you give us a little background on Heavy Nights? What does it mean to you? How did it come into being?

Thank you! Heavy Nights. Written over the last 5 years. Some ideas a little older I suppose. Lyrically these are all more recent. Some of the music had kicked around in my head for awhile though. A lot has changed for me in the last half decade. A new relationship. The birth of my son. Reconnecting with nature and country living. I feel like I’m always working on the next Evening Hymns record and eventually a collection of songs come together.

One of the things that strikes me about the record is the interplay between isolation and connection. There’s a loneliness to the songs, a sense of remove from certain people or places that’s baked into the nocturnal vibes, the heavy snow. But then there’s this tenderness too. A warmth. The sense that each track is a direct communication to the absent thing, no matter how remote or deferred. It’s something that seems to represent the spirit of Evening Hymns in many ways, and I find myself wondering where it comes from exactly. I know you record in a pretty remote location, but there’s a chicken and egg thing with that too. Do records take on the spirit of the places in which they were recorded, or do you seek out those places to realise the spirit of the record?

This is a heavy question because it’s something I think about often enough and is deep rooted in me. I grew up in the country and grew up entertaining myself in a way. The whole wanting to be in isolation in the country makes sense to me. It’s slow and introspective. Thoughtful. I like to be alone. It allows me to make up my world around me however I want to imagine it and that’s helpful for my creativity. I think it would be hard for me to make something aggressive out here. It’s a pastoral place. Quiet and peaceful. Often with my ambient work I’m going right to a specific location to have in infuse all the music. With Evening Hymns the two things are constantly working in sympatico. I’m always out and about with the antennae up trying to make sense of how I feel and what’s happening around me. It’s exhausting. Haha.

Despite this binding spirit, there’s been a significant evolution of the Evening Hymns sound. With the synths and drum machines, Heavy Nights is the richest, most pop-orientated record yet. Does this represent an evolution of your artistic sensibilities too, is it just that this sound was the most fitting for these particular songs?

I think I wanted to make something that sounded romantic. I wanted it to be rich and hazy. During the writing process I was falling out of and then into love. Many changes going on. A lot of late nights wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Drinking wine and feeling poetic. I think all of my music is pop music. I’m trying to make even sad songs feel catchy. This one I tried to frame in more of a classic song world as I was listening to a lot of older music. I wanted to make a 70s pop record. It’s what I was connecting with at the time.

You’ve spoken about how you worked on some of the songs for years, putting them aside when you felt they weren’t quite where you wanted them. I’m interested in how you decide when something is ready, the moment when the final song emerges from the idea. Is the whole process down to intuition and feeling? Do you have the equivalent of editors, first listeners to help you through?

It’s intuition for sure but it’s funny because I do a lot of producing now and I’ll listen to demos from artists and then new versions and then they get to the studio and it’s constantly changing and I often get to witness the artist just circle around in the weeds. We all do it I think. I’m aware of that with some of my songwriting process. A song like ‘My Drugs, My Dreams’ I kicked around for a really long time. I had a pretty thorough sketch of it during the recording of Quiet Energies but it just wasn’t ready. I really liked the chorus and I felt like I owed it to that chorus to bring words and verses that were as strong. I’d pick up a guitar and work away on it when I felt like it. There isn’t really any editors. Just different versions of me at different stages I guess. Haha. I’m not really sure if this album version is even superior to the first version but it made me happiest and that is the end goal.

I wanted to ask about intimate songs. An intensely personal and difficult thread started on Spirit Guides and ran right through Spectral Dusk, and while subsequent records have taken on different issues there still a sense of that rawness, of private emotion. Heavy Nights is no different in that regard, and it got me thinking about the process of delving into the places that we might otherwise try to bury. Is it cathartic? Exhausting? Do you think the compulsion to capture such moments is an act of escaping them, or remembering?

I wouldn’t say it’s cathartic. It’s certainly exhausting. For me it’s a version of therapy. It doesn’t really feel great but it seems to help me. It forced me to really try and understand what my Dad’s death was to me and what our relationship was like. I think the aspect of playing the songs over and over again is the exhausting part. Touring them and having to conjure up those spirits each night was a challenge. I think if I didn’t have any problems I wouldn’t be writing. The song has always been a vehicle for me to understand myself more clearly. It’s never an escape. It’s maybe remembering. But it’s really just searching for meaning and understanding in the challenging moments.

How about in terms of giving the songs away to the listener? As an example, I saw you play in Cardiff with The Wooden Sky in late summer 2012, and there was something right around the corner that meant I lent heavily on Spectral Dusk in the months/years after. For me, that record is still about grief and loss, but one that is entirely my own. It struck me that the artist has to give up something. To let the songs be adapted to a series of adjacent tragedies and traumas, and I wondered how that exchange feels in practice?

I don’t feel like I’m responsible for the songs once they’re out there. The songwriting process is a pretty selfish practice for me. I’m writing to free myself from some weight and once my work there is done the songs are free to roam and be whatever they want to be for people. I was a really sad guy making that record, understandably, and there is an energy in everything that I did with that record that is saturated in that sadness. I feel like something magical happened with that album, or that I reached some level of clarity in understanding my Dad and his passing when we were recording, that certain people are able to use the record to also reach that same place. Maybe that’s getting a little mystical or something but that album felt honest to me. A transmission from a son to his father that other people are allowed to intercept. I think that losing someone is a gift in the sense that it creates these profound moments of real immediacy and honest and rawness. It’s a gift to be that present. If you are. If you’re in it, in all of it’s intensity.

Since the writing process was my way of understanding stuff I don’t feel like I’m giving anything away with it once the songs come out. I’ve got what I need from them at that point. The idea that others can use them to explore their own emotions is amazing. And if it gives anybody something to lean on in a hard time while that’s just an amazing byproduct.

I’m so grateful that Spectral Dusk has been that for a lot of people. Writing Heavy Nights felt similar albeit with the heartbreak of an old relationship. Whereas the last record Quiet Energies really felt like I was writing to pick myself back up again. Heavy Nights felt like sliding back into that old world of writing about my sadness to understand it more. What went wrong. What changed. Who am I now? I hope the heartbroken find this record in the wee hours.

Heavy Nights is out now via Shuffling Feet Records and you can get it from the Evening Hymns Bandcamp page.

Photographs by Caylie Runciman

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After a number of releases in the interim, we’re delighted to share ‘Far Away’, the brand new single from Lizzy & the Fanatics. Opening with warm washes of synths, the track quickly sets out a sense of grandness, its sparkling pop sound possessing the depth and richness of an early nineties movie soundtrack.

Thematically, the track takes on the unreality of the online experience, drawing a line between the countless not-quite-lived moments of our time on the internet and the action of dreaming. For we can be free online, not quite ourselves or not ourselves at all, or even a hundred different selves all at once. As Lizzy sings: “A thousand dreams in the same night / a thousand versions of me in sight.”

However, ‘Far Away’ is not a celebration of this new reality. Because in this atomisation of the self, this flattening, something is lost. It might not be immediately obvious, or easily diagnosed, but a nagging feeling persists. For the internet can be less like a freedom and more like a retreat. A withdrawal from everything but the most superficial, transient contact.

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Entirely self-produced and performed, the debut Best Mann album …And The Sky shows how impactful such a blend can be. The record was formed in the aftermath of the death of a friend and bandmate, an attempt to honour her memory and confront the grief of such a loss, and Mondschein uses his array of influences to form a sound that is up to the task.

Emerging from a curtain of sheer ambient swirls, the introduction ‘Dipper’ bleeds into ‘MCO’ and sets the warm, atmospheric tone. There are comparisons to be drawn to Volcano Choir here, intricate art pop sounds woven into humane shapes, practicing experimentation and complexity not as some superficial aesthetic choice but rather in an attempt to map sensations that are otherwise impossible to elucidate. “Now that you mention, I’m not sure I even know where to start,” Mondschein sings, mourning curdling memories into dense ball.

Here is the room, we stained the walls
Here is the street after dark

Here is the ending
So much quieter than I would’ve thought.

The previous track fading out to sparkling keys, the Dirty Projectors-esque ‘Hudson // Holland’ arrives with a jagged, stumbling sound, the uncertainty of Mondschein’s lyrics extending into the very fabric of the track. The result is one of tension, the listener cast directly into instability of Mondschein’s headspace as he wrestles with memories amid a consuming grief. Still, his vocals remain earnest and heartfelt, and though track never achieves a real sense of balance, the groove stabilises somewhat, as though by diving into the confusion some answer or consolation might be salvaged, some equilibrium regained.

After the soaring folk rock of ‘MST’ and the pitter patter pop of ‘On the Line’, ‘Modern Love’ presents an almost conversational tone set atop a sparking, shimmering backdrop. Around the halfway point this coalesces into rich climax, channeling the likes of Typhoon in its ability to present something so uplifting as to almost become transcendent. “Just believe, tomorrow bends to not alone,” Mondschein sings, “Just believe, on the other side there’s something more.”

The transition into ‘Like a Knife’ is seamless, reinforcing the record’s cohesive form. This is a proper album, one to be played front to back, the artistry of the writing and composition possessing a macro-level dimension in the shape and order of the tracks. The achievement is all the more impressive considering the stylistic variety across the record, like how the laid-back folk pop of ‘LittleHeart’ can segue into the ebullient bounce of ‘Gold’.

The closing pair of tracks represent two of the most direct and evocative songs on the record, confronting death in all its elemental force. “And the sky broke, and the earth shook,” Mondschein notes on the title track, “and the trees fell, and the birds left, and even if they hadn’t / I still would’ve know you were / gone.” Strung up between the disbelief that life continues in the aftermath of loss and the disgrace that we allow it to, the song is a nuanced take on grief—grief in all of its mystery and mundanity—and the closer ‘Must Be Wrong’ pushes this into a fierce, majestic, finale fitting of an album that is carved from the bare rock of human experience.

Still I’m waking up beside the love she said I’d find
Still I go to work without her running through my mind
Still I keep on breathing, I’m not empty all the time—
This must be wrong
Tell me how can it not be wrong

…And The Sky is out now and available from the Best Mann Bandcamp page.

Photos by Georgia Teensma

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