So treasured, in fact, that Antiquated Future decided the collaboration between Thomas and Barnes would be the perfect focus for the latest in their Selected Songs series. In recent years, these releases have preserved, celebrated and reintroduced some of the finest indie releases, offering compilations of singles, rarities and demos and live takes to give the fullest picture of the acts on show. You Can Tell Everyone Under the Sun (Selected Songs, 2004​-​2013) collects the very best tracks from across the Mighty Clouds discography, as well as those Saturday Looks Good To Me songs to which Barnes lent her vocals. “The concept for this volume arrived several years ago, making iPod playlists of all the SLGTM songs she sang on,” the label explain:

Live recordings where Betty is singing some classic songs she hadn’t originally recorded with the group, lost Mighty Clouds tracks—the material was all so strong, yet difficult to arrange cohesively. But it had to be done! This sort of compiling—bringing together tracks from all over to tell a story that is important to us is what the Selected Songs series is all about.

But as if that wasn’t enough, Antiquated Future are also releasing a two brand new songs recorded by Mighty Clouds as a standalone 7″ single. Excitingly described as the “beginning of a new chapter,” A-side ‘Anagram’ signals an evolution of the Mighty Clouds style, maintaining some of the sincerity and retro wistfulness for which the project is known but adding new layers of atmosphere. The track’s gauzy depth nods towards noise or almost shoegaze sensibilities, while the ambiguity of the lyrics only plays into the complicated mood—where a bright energy is stalked by an unshakeably foreboding shadow.

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With a sound that borrowed equally from folk, DIY pop and post-punk, Brennan’s music was continually surprising and distinctive. It married slow moments of heartfelt reflection with others that rose in jagged peaks, unusual melodies and unpretentiously poetic lyrics that offered glimpses of life’s moments, both mundane and exceptional.

For When the Future Rolls Around (Selected Songs, 2012-2017) illustrates this style perfectly, bringing together tracks from both albums as well as home-recorded releases, live cuts and previously unreleased material. The first single is ‘Resilience’, a song that first appeared on 2015’s Radisson Blue that sketches seemingly quotidian scenes to talk about a bigger picture. “Sitting in the living room on Essex Street,” it begins, backed by simple electric guitar and a feeling of negative space, “you had just shaved your head and I’d been out to eat.” As the title suggests the takeaway emotion is something hopeful, especially when the drums kick in and the whole thing takes on the quality of a slo-mo pop punk hit.

my bedroom has moths in
they’re tiny, they eat nothing
my clothes do not have holes in
I thought they would by now

more resilience than expected

As with previous Selected Songs releases, the release comes on beautiful gold-foil cassettes packaged in letterpress and offset-print boxes and bundled with a risograph-printed booklet of essays by Selected Songs series co-curator Joshua James Amberson and Roxy Brennan. It’s a fitting tribute to the project, a must for long-time fans and the ideal introduction for new listeners.

For When the Future Rolls Around (Selected Songs, 2012-2017) will be released on 31st May and you can get it on cassette or as a download from the Antiquated Future Bandcamp page.

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That is, until Antiquated Future began an excavation. The next instalment of the Selected Songs series, kicked off by Fred Thomas’s Another Song About Riding the Bus, Your Most Secret Name (Selected Songs 2008​-​2011) digs through self-released CDs and out of print compilations to form the definite guide to the Twig Palace. Both as a way to remember their impact, preserve their influence, and garner a new audience for their playful pop retro style.

The best introduction is lead single ‘Tin Bees’, which is able to wrap up all the oddness, sweetness and unpredictability of Twig Palace’s music into less than two minutes. It’s ingrained with a sense of joy, the infectiousness of its almost staccato repetitive melody proving hard to resist. Johnson and Hashi swap vocal duties across the collection, and here they come together with glee. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know me by now,” they sing in a typically strange but charming opening line, “I’ve got tin bees tapping on the roof of my mouth, and I’ve set my watches to tick in time with your pulse.”

‘Paragraph on a Pin’s Head’ again shows of the band’s erratic nature, segueing from an acapella intro (“An egg hatched in your skull and the bird flies out”) to moments of tender almost-silence, a hymn-like middle section to frantic spikes of jubilant indie pop. The loose-limbed ‘TA-X2i’ flickers into life like a Sunday morning dawn and grows into something bright and glad, while ‘Nautilus Teeth’ and ‘Where Land Meets the Sky’ show a more wistful side, and songs like ‘Pangea’ possess a creeping, infectious energy that pulls the listener into its taut rhythms. Across sixteen songs, Your Most Secret Name reinforces Twig Palace as one of the most inventive and distinctive bands from a fertile period of indie music, preserving their music and extending their influence even further.

Your Most Secret Name (Selected Songs 2008​-​2011) is out now via Antiquated Future and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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The collection includes songs from a variety of Thomas’s projects. Saturday Looks Good to Me, City Center, Failed Flowers and Idle Ray are all represented, as well the impressive Fred Thomas solo oeuvre. And in combining proper recordings with radio sessions, it portrays both ends of the spectrum. Detailed electronic soundscapes and lush retro pop tones sit alongside the jagged, imperfect urgency of live performances.

The release also gives a picture of how his work fits into the indie landscape that developed alongside him, a view that shows just how versatile Fred Thomas has been. There’s something of early Emperor X in the scrappy, urgency of ‘Cookies’, a clear link to the sincere alt-folk of Nana Grizol and co. in ‘Susceptible to Ghosts’, while the lo-fi pop electronics of ‘It Sounds Like They’re In Love With You’ sits adjacent to the work of Stephen Merritt. The folk-inflected ‘Summer of OMD’ owes as much to emo as acoustic, the playful ‘Can’t Ever Sleep’ a close cousin of Owen Ashworth‘s Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, but what is most striking is how he cycles through these genres without ever losing his own individuality. Fred Thomas has no clear position within the web of indie music, and makes no promises beyond the fact that his work could not be by anyone else. The songs might sound wildly different, but they all sound exactly like Fred Thomas.

Another Song About Riding the Bus is out now via Antiquated Future and you can get it from Bandcamp. The release is the first in Antiquated Future’s Selected Songs series, created in collaboration with Two Plum Press, which will see these back catalogue deep-dives curated on golden ticket cassette tapes and packaged in letterpress and offset-print boxes and accompanied with a risograph-printed booklet of liner notes and essays.

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