Posted on Friday 15th May 2020 at 19:46
Some of our favourites are back with new music this week! It's been so great to get stuck into full lengths by both Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and The Dears.
There were also some great releases by fast-rising artists Lady Bird and Crack Cloud, both exciting prospects who we're banking on bringing huge performances to their tours at the end of the year.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Reunions
Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and musician Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit release their highly anticipated new album, Reunions, via Southeastern Records / Thirty Tigers. Produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb and recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, the album features 10 new songs written by Isbell.
In a press release announcing the album, Isbell says: “There are a lot of ghosts on this album. Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re also about who I used to be, the ghost of myself. I found myself writing songs that I wanted to write fifteen years ago, but in those days, I hadn’t written enough songs to know how to do it yet. Just now have I been able to pull it off to my own satisfaction. In that sense it’s a reunion with the me I was back then.”
Buy your Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit tickets here.
The Dears – Lovers Rock
Montréal stalwarts The Dears release their eighth studio album 'Lovers Rock' via Dangerbird Records.
The Dears’ 2003 breakthrough album No Cities Left was a crepuscular, romantic soundtrack to uncertain times. 9/11. War. The looming economic crisis. Nearly two decades later, as Murray Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak began work on Lovers Rock, the world’s mood felt eerily similar
There’s a direct line between the sort of doominess of No Cities Left and this album,” says Lightburn. “You could go straight from Lovers Rock to No Cities Left and it’s like they're interlocked. But it's a different kind of doom. Around 2001, it felt like, ‘We have no control. We don't know what's going to happen next.’ Now it’s a doom that's within our grasp. It’s in the air. It’s between us. But we do nothing about it.”
If The Dears have always made apocalyptic love songs for an existential crisis, there are also other constants, starting, of course, with the band’s two core members for two decades: Lightburn and Yanchak. There are also certain sonic and aesthetic parameters, within which the music can be both unsettlingly experimental and impossibly lush: part Bacharach, part Krautrock. From the anthemic anger and driving resignation of 'Heart of An Animal' to the swoony, swerving, epic 'The Worst In Us', Lovers Rock is the sound of The Dears topping themselves yet again, an accomplishment borne of ambition, hard work, and a strong sense of identity.
Buy your The Dears tickets here.
Lady Bird - WWW
It's a new track from Lady Bird, and it's a big one. 'WWW' has got us all fired up this week alongside its glitchy and intense lockdown created video. With so much of our lives online for now it only seems apt that we include a track called WWW in our round up this week!
On the track the band say: “What does a war and a web have in common? Who wants to be caught in one? Why ask? This song likes to tickle the Queen bee’s feet whilst sharing thoughts and observations about her beautiful hive and obedient colony. The Wicked War of the West tells ‘slippery stories and…tales’ of familiar and somewhat fictional concepts via a punk pop rock rock banger”.
There is a brand-new EP ‘BRAINWASH MACHINE SETTING’ out next month which means there'll be plenty more Lady Bird to get stuck into before their end of year Nottingham and Guildford shows.
Buy your Lady Bird tickets here.
Crack Cloud - Ouster Stew
Alongside news of shows at Leeds' Brudenell Social Club and Brighton's Hope and Ruin later this year, Crack Cloud have announced that their debut album ‘Pain Machine’ is on the way "(17th July).
A mixed-media collective based out of Vancouver, BC. Crack Cloud are modelled around harm reduction philosophy, operating as a rehabilitative outlet for a revolving cast of multi-disciplinary artists across Canada.
The brand-new lead single ‘Ouster Stew’ is a gloriously wonky and fun synth-punk track, and the latest instalment in their PAIN OLYMPICS series which is all worth checking out. The video is full of gothic and theatrical imagery, you should 100% watch it now.
Buy your Crack Cloud tickets here.
Check out all of this week's releases in our Spotify playlist:
