New Music Weekly!

“We spent a lot of time after the first record growing as people, being humans outside of tour for a little bit, and trying to shed the imposter syndrome.” Luciano says. Spending the time to make the kind of music they really wanted to make and making sure they felt good about it was crucial to the success of tracks like Night Terrors. It’s a slower-paced song than Diet Cig’s usual, but just as biting; a song about reckoning with all the past versions of yourself. As Luciano puts it, “Am I still these people, or have I shapeshifted?” It’s essentially the thesis of Do You Wonder About Me?, considering and accepting the embarrassing aspects of your identity, and how they’re just as much a part of you as the good stuff.

On American Aquarium’s new album 'Lamentations', Barham shines light on dark American corners with heartbreaking conversations, long looks in the mirror, and empathetic questions, all through songwriting that is clear without sacrificing its poetry, and direct without losing its humanity.

As much as Barham appreciates an indignant protest song or one-sided anthem, he isn’t writing them. Instead, on Lamentations he’s making the political personal, reaching out to humanize folks with opposing viewpoints, and offering dignity instead of demonizing. The result is the strongest writing of Barham’s already stout career.

The two-time Mercury Prize nominee Ghostpoet (aka Obaro Ejimiwe) follows up 2017’s acclaimed 'Dark Days and Canapés' with a record which couldn’t feel more prescient, a dystopian snapshot of the universal unease and anxiety we feel as we enter into this new decade, an uncertain future distilled across these 10 vital tracks.

The bluesy, gritty 'Concrete Pony' is the perfect entry point to the record – in Obaro’s own words; “It’s a snapshot of where we’re at as a society I feel, we seem to have everything and nothing at all. Infinite possibilities and choices galore but we seem set in stone, frozen in place, oblivious to the storm clouds in the distance…”

Boston Manor’s third full-length 'Glue' is the sound of a band questioning the state of the world around them. Inevitably, in a critical examination of the modern world, it comes from a dark place, but one that fuelled the five-piece to create a body of work that elevates their craft further than ever before. Its 13 highly charged songs came out of a process that singer Henry Cox describes as “very chaotic”, but the result is a truly ferocious album - one that both draws and moves on from what they’ve done in the past, incorporating the gloomy atmospherics of 2018’s Welcome To The Neighbourhood with the highly charged yet melodic punk of 2016’s debut Be Nothing.