FEATURE:
Contenders
IN THIS PHOTO: Sprints
Mercury Prize-Worthy Albums from July 2023 to February 2024
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EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Corinne Bailey Rae
we have to wait until the summer to find out which twelve albums are shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize. Last year’s dozen was a very strong field. The prize was won by Ezra Collective for their album, Where I’m Meant to Be. There was a blend of debut albums, albums from legends, in addition to some eclectic and experimental albums mixing alongside darker Folk and Disco-Pop. Since the 2023 ceremony, we have seen some tremendous albums from British and Irish albums. The eligibility for shortlisting ran up to 15th July, 2023. I assume everything released after that and before 15th July or thereabouts this year will be eligible. I think there have been a selection so far that could well be in contention when we discover who will make the dozen shortlist Mercury albums this year. From a brand-new album from Nadine Shah to the debut from The Last Dinner Party, it is clear that some of these magnificent albums are going to be named later in the year. Rather than get the hopes up of these artists, it is a temperature check and early prediction. I will do an updated feature in three or four months. Right now, sort of at the half-way point, there are albums I feel are Mercury-worthy. Below are ten terrific releases that should be on that prestigious shortlist…
IN July.
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Nadine Shah – Filthy Underneath
Release Date: 23rd February, 2024
Label: EMI North
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/nadine-shah/filthy-underneath
Producer: Ben Hillier
Standout Tracks: You Drive, I Shoot/Sad Lads Anonymous/Twenty Things
Key Cut: Topless Mother
Review:
“Like countless singer-songwriters before her, South Tyneside-born auteur Nadine Shah has used her lived experience as a springboard. Love Your Dum and Mad, her 2013 debut, channelled her grief after two friends took their own lives. Kitchen Sink, Shah’s 2020 outing, pilloried the absurdities of thirtysomething womanhood. Between records, she has been outspoken on racism and musicians’ dwindling incomes. Filthy Underneath is, though, her most personal statement yet. Topless Mother details a sub par therapy experience with Shah’s usual unsparing eye; Twenty Things pays homage to her fellow-travellers to sobriety, some of whom did not make it.
The idea of trauma porn has deservedly come under scrutiny, particularly where race and gender are factors. But Filthy Underneath feels like an intelligently calibrated vehicle in which musical and emotional progress is made, even as suffering laps at the running boards like flood water. Shah nursed her mother through terminal cancer, got married and divorced, tried to take her own life and entered rehab. She handles the anguish of it all with a deft observational touch. You can hear the link, via producer Ben Hillier, between Shah’s intimate interiors and the stadium goth of Depeche Mode, with whom she recently toured (Hillier has produced both). But a heightened sense of rhythm pushes Shah along relentlessly, and her glacial, swooping melodies contain non-western inspirations such as Sufi singer Abida Parveen” – The Guardian
CMAT - Crazymad, For Me
Release Date: 13th October, 2023
Label: AWAL
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/cmat/crazymad-for-me
Producer: Matias Tellez
Standout Tracks: California/Where Are Your Kids Tonight?/Have Fun!
Key Cut: Rent
Review:
“On last year’s debut ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’, CMAT swung open the doors to her bold, brilliant world via a set of sparkling heart-on-sleeve anthems, and a good dose of pop culture nous. On its follow-up, though, the ante’s been upped considerably. Arriving with a suitably bonkers concept in tow (involving a 47-year-old CMAT and a malfunctioning time machine), this second album not only delves into the anger and heartbreak of a toxic relationship, but manages to do so with such a deft sense of wit and flare that it’s impossible, as a listener, not to feel embedded within the story itself. Once again, she transforms pop culture into poetry, painting the most vivid of worlds in the process, while her brand of country-indebted pop feels even richer this time around. From the gentle acoustics of the Sex and the City-inspired ‘Such A Miranda’, to the Bowie-esque glam stomp of ‘Rent’’s outro; the soaring sass of the John Grant-featuring ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’ to the glitzy self-aware wink of closer ‘Have Fun!’, ‘CrazyMad, For Me’ is a triumphant whirlwind of pain and self-preservation, which reveals more of itself with every listen” – DIY
Sampha – Lahai
Release Date: 20th October, 2023
Label: Young
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/sampha/lahai
Producers: Ricky Damian/El Guincho/Kwake Bass/Kwes/Teo Halm/Sampha
Standout Tracks: Dancing Circles/Only/What If You Hypnotise Me?
Key Cut: Spirit 2.0
Review:
“Last time Sampha Sisay gifted us with a full-length record, the London-based singer-songwriter produced Process, a record centered on grief, anxiety, and mourning in the aftermath of his mother’s passing. Now, the electronic chaos of his earlier work is traded for softness as he sings of higher powers, healing, and – perhaps most of all – his daughter, born during the pandemic.
The warm synths of lead single “Spirit 2.0” create a fitting backdrop for the artist as he sings of waves, light, faith, love, time, and spirit. In the context of the record, “Spirit 2.0” comes after “Stereo Colour Cloud,” which opens Lahai with a female voice proclaiming “I wish you could time / time-missile back-forward.”
Time is an ever-present motif on Lahai. On the interlude “Time Piece,” another female voice asks (in French) for a time machine ‘to go back’ in time. “Can’t Go Back” is the track that follows, interpolating the opening lines from “Stereo Colour Cloud” in its hook.
There are a handful of featured voices on Lahai; and every single one is female. It’d be foolish to then not note Lahai’s devotion to Wassoulou music, the West African genre performed almost entirely by women.
As Sampha declares his daughter ‘heaven-sent’ on “Can’t Go Back,” the singer’s words call back to his description of himself as a prisoner to heaven on 2017’s “Timmy’s Prayer.” Singing of spirits, surrounded by female voices reminding him of time, and amidst his musings on the connection between his past and his future, Lahai’s remarkable second half pulls together the record as an expressionist painting of life’s cyclical nature as Sampha reflects on his daughter’s place in his life, and her connection to her late grandmother. “You’re enough evidence for me,” the singer declares on “Evidence.”
On the penultimate track “What If You Hypnotise Me?” we get a glimpse into the anxieties and fears that still burden Sampha: “Please articulate my anguish / please explain to me why these raindrops accompany better times.” The classic Sampha drum-driven beat is broken, giving way to a steady beeping akin to a heartbeat on an ECG machine.
Finally, one more female voice enters. Maybe it’s the spirit of Sampha’s mother, with new life breathed into her, her memory living through her newborn granddaughter. Or maybe it’s Sampha’s daughter. Or maybe it’s nobody. No matter who it is, we know who Sampha is: a generational talent who has once again delivered a rich, emotional work for us to process. Lahai is phenomenal” – The Line of Best Fit
Corinne Bailey Rae - Black Rainbows
Release Date: 15th September, 2023
Labels: Black Rainbows/Thirty Tigers
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/corinne-bailey-rae/black-rainbows-2
Producers: S. J. Brown/Corinne Bailey Rae/Paris Strother
Standout Tracks: Black Rainbows/New York Transit Queen/Peach Velvet Sky
Key Cut: Erasure
Review:
“I feel it’s this weird punk, jazz kind of moment for me,” Corinne Bailey Rae told Stereoboard last year. It’s not a statement you might expect from a Grammy-winning singer who’s best-known for warm, easy-going neo-soul that soundtracked many a suburban dinner party in the late ‘00s. What next? Katie Melua dabbling in speed-metal? Norah Jones in corpse paint?
And yet here we are: ‘Black Rainbows’, Rae’s fourth album, swings from crunching glam-punk to skronking experimental jazz that wouldn’t sound out of place on David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’. There are left turns, and then there’s this. The Leeds-raised musician’s creative epiphany occurred on tour in Chicago, where she visited the Stony Island Arts Bank, a centre of Black history that honours African-American citizens while holding the country’s brutally racist past to account.
This challenging array of exhibits fired Rae’s imagination. Her new album’s centrepiece, lead single ‘New York Transit Queen’, was inspired by a photo of Audrey Smaltz, a Black 17-year-old model who won the Miss New York Transit pageant in 1954. The result is a fabulous blast of riot grrrl with enough handclaps, guitar squalls and joyously chanted vocals to blow a hole in the 6 Music playlist. We’re a long way from ‘Put Your Records On’.
On the flipside is ‘Erasure’, a pummelling neo-grunge track that sees Rae spit, through distorted vocals, about her disgust at the violence that besets Black children: “They try to erase you / They try to eviscerate you.” It’s a stunning piece of protest music that puts many a full-time punk band to shame (which is less surprising than it seems, given that she fronted a teenage riot grrl group with the extremely hardcore name Helen).
Rae initially planned to release this record – her independent debut – as a “side project”, but ultimately found the confidence to place ‘Black Rainbows’ front-and-centre. Perhaps that’s why the album also trades in the accessible sounds with which she made her name – take the pretty piano ballad ‘Peach Velvet Sky’ and loungey Winehouse pastiche ‘He Will Follow You With His Eyes’. Even the latter, though, segues into a spooky electronic soundscape.
The gear shifts can be jarring, but album four is actually more cohesive than it has any right to be, a fact its creator has attributed to her common thread of influence in Stony Island Arts Bank. Horns up: Corinne Bailey Rae has thrown the musical curveball of the year” – NME
Blur – The Ballad of Darren
Release Date: 21st July, 2023
Label: Parlophone
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/blur/the-ballad-of-darren-2
Producer: James Ford
Standout Tracks: The Ballad/The Narcissist/Avalon
Key Cut: Barbaric
Review:
“Early on in The Ballad of Darren, the unexpected and understated Blur reunion album, Damon Albarn sings "We have lost the feeling that we thought we'd never lose," a line that could easily be interpreted as the vocalist addressing his bandmates. Blur lost an intangible feeling during an acrimonious split in the early 2000s, the band limping forward after the departure of guitarist Graham Coxon during the sessions for Think Tank. Within a few years, the group tended to their lingering wounds, healing enough to play the occasional reunion concert, a union that eventually led to The Magic Whip, a happy accident of an album. The Ballad of Darren is something entirely different. Where Coxon crafted The Magic Whip from studio jams the band left behind after a week exiled in Hong Kong, Blur recorded The Ballad of Darren as a unit within the studio, shaping and coloring compositions Albarn wrote while on tour with Gorillaz in 2022. It's how Blur made records back in the '90s but, notably, the group replaced their mainstay Stephen Street with James Ford, a producer who has worked with Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine, not to mention Gorillaz. Ford teases out the louche, loungey aspects of Albarn's songs, lending a lushness to the melancholy undercurrents that flow through The Ballad of Darren. Apart from "St. Charles Square," which announces itself with a flurry of guitar skronk and profanity, there's no direct evocation of Blur's younger days; far from conjuring the ghost of the melodramatic "To the End," the hints of hi-fi sophistication lend weary texture to melodies that sigh and linger. Albarn spends the album pondering severed connections and vanished spaces, sentiments that could be read either as mourning a personal loss or as a meditation on a post-pandemic world, yet The Ballad of Darren doesn't feel precisely sad, not in the way Damon's solo albums often can. Blur gives Albarn's songs depth and dimension, as Graham Coxon decorates the margins left by the elastic rhythms of Alex James and Dave Rowntree. The Magic Whip hinted at the essence of this chemistry but The Ballad of Darren revels in it, resulting in an album that feels age-appropriate without being stodgy: it's mature and nuanced, cherishing the connections that once were taken for granted but now seem precious” – AllMusic
The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstasy
Release Date: 2nd February, 2024
Label: Island
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/the-last-dinner-party/prelude-to-ecstasy
Producer: James Ford
Standout Tracks: Caesar on a TV Screen/Sinner/Nothing Matters
Key Cut: The Feminine Urge
Review:
“It could have been a very different outcome. When you have a debut single that bulldozes through the music scene in the way that Nothing Matters did last year, it’s usually only downhill from there. Indeed, the enormous early success of The Last Dinner Party soon led to accusations of the London band being either nepo babies who were fast-tracked to the top or manufactured industry plants – charges not subdued by their top placing on the BBC’s Sound of 2024 poll and a Brit Award as rising stars. Really, there is only one way to quieten the naysayers: make a killer debut album.
Prelude to Ecstasy is just that: a pop album that swerves and swoops into unexpected places but with plenty of hidden depths to discover with every listen. The band, led by Abigail Morris, take a forward-thinking approach to songwriting yet are similarly unafraid to dip into nostalgia for a brief wallow. Opening the record with a classical overture, borrowing from 1980s acts such as Kate Bush and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and plundering a hearty baroque influence throughout, this is a delightfully offbeat and incredibly accomplished collection, steered by the steady hand of James Ford, its producer.
More to the point, these are simply great songs. Morris, her versatile voice laden with both charisma and firepower, sells her lyric sheet with a convincing side of melodrama, as heard on Burn Alive (“I break off my rib to make another you”) and Portrait (“I’d die for you, no questions asked/ If anyone could kill me, it probably would be you”), songs that sound as if they were plucked from the soundtrack of the 1980s cult horror film The Lost Boys. If Florence Welch is too screechy for your taste, the slightly more understated Feminine Urge ticks a similar box without the vocal histrionics. Sinner and Caesar on a TV Screen do a line in barbed, tongue-in-cheek indiepop; My Lady of Mercy deftly switches between a Sparks-like surrealist pop verse and a beefy stadium-rock chorus, while the sultry Portrait shows that the band are not afraid to pull out the big guns when required, building to a powerful, string-drenched climax.
Is there an element of shtick to it all? Undoubtedly: this is a band that thrives on image, as their stylised music videos and extravagant stagewear have shown. Yet beneath the facade is also thoughtful, well-crafted songwriting that instils a confidence that we’ll be hearing more of The Last Dinner Party in years to come. And if not? Well, they’ve made that killer debut album, regardless” – The Irish Times
The Smile – Wall of Eyes
Release Date: 26th January, 2024
Label: XL
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/the-smile/wall-of-eyes
Producer: Sam Petts-Davies
Standout Tracks: Wall of Eyes/Read the Room/Friend of a Friend
Key Cut: Bending Hectic
Review:
“As far back as 2009, Jonny Greenwood was fed up with the faff of the world’s most studious stadium band. “He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work,” Thom Yorke said that year. Despite the guitarist and composer’s impatience, he was prone to obsessing over what Yorke called the “extra things”: the sly strings and choked squeals that thread razor wire into Radiohead’s pillowed luxury. “‘Come on, we need some wrong notes,’ he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em,” Yorke joked.
But never have we heard Greenwood quite like this. On Wall of Eyes, the second album from the Smile, his hostile harmonies and expediency in the studio nudge the trio somewhere new; it is his most exciting and volatile performance since In Rainbows. No time for their usual effortful cohesion: Producer Sam Petts-Davies resolves to stress, not conceal, the eclecticism of Yorke and Greenwood’s songs, while drummer Tom Skinner squirrels around making nests in their inhospitable time signatures. After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.
More than anything on A Light for Attracting Attention, the Beatlesy “Friend of a Friend” and riotous “Bending Hectic” present contrasting spectacles of the Smile’s allure. The former draws inspiration from lockdown footage of Italians uniting in song on their balconies; the coda juxtaposes that pandemic solidarity against the elites’ response. “All of that money, where did it go?/In somebody’s pocket, a friend of a friend,” Yorke laments, invoking the COVID cronyism of Britain’s Conservative Party. But the tune is divine, even hummable—his deftest lunge for your heartstrings since unshelving “True Love Waits.”
At the other extreme, “Bending Hectic” indulges Yorke’s time-honored passion for calamitous automobile events—in this case the last moments of a public figure, apparently disgraced, who vows to drive off the Italian mountainside. The band plays the car-crash suicide ballad as a brilliantly twisted love song: Such is the narrator’s hubris that, when an orchestral crescendo signals the plunge, and Greenwood’s lustrous string bends transmute into tire squeals, we hear the infernal crusade as a valorous final act.
Across the album, Greenwood’s haywire guitars and arrangements veer between Can’s warehouse expressionism and Robert Wyatt’s alien-abducted folk fusion, conspiring with the live production and convulsive rhythms to save his bandmate from his more ponderous impulses. Yorke’s ethereal vocal register has long been his calling card and his crutch, tested to dizzying effect on the verses of “Climbing Up the Walls” before taking root on The King of Limbs. These days, he is split between warring impulses to command a song or spritz it with ghostly vapor. But even his weaker spells enchant, and Wall of Eyes opens with two irresistible slow burners: the wintry bossa nova title track, where he murmurs about digital surveillance and sedation (“You will go behind a wall of eyes/Of your own device/Is that still you with the hollow eyes?”), and “Teleharmonic,” from the “All I Need” school of fraught narrators caught in whirlpool synths, clinging to love like a life preserver.
By sequencing the two foggiest songs up front, the album lulls you into a trance. Then Greenwood’s guitar, coaxed from the sidelines, electrifies the nerve center on “Read the Room” and “Under Our Pillows,” an alt-rock suite of clanking-piston hooks and motorik finales. When the tension lifts with a music-box melody or swell of London Contemporary Orchestra strings, the songs have surprised us twice: first by forestalling expectations of beauty, then by providing it anyway.
The second side’s tour-de-luxe falters only on “I Quit,” one of those Smile songs that perhaps suffers from Greenwood’s desire to release records “90 percent as good [that] come out twice as often.” Where the arresting closer “You Know Me!” evolves Yorke’s paranoid balladry, “I Quit” is the discount “Codex” or “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor”: intoxicating as ever but without the final revelation—the sense of dawn penetrating some murky underworld—that tilts those Radiohead songs into the sublime.
After decades refining, refusing, and reformulating the Radiohead sound, Yorke and Greenwood seem emboldened to stop resisting—to loosen up and let their songwriting impulses absorb whatever happens to be on their stereo that day. Wall of Eyes gives center stage to jazz, kosmische, prog—aesthetic signposts and satellite genres usually kept in the more established band’s wings. The Smile, though stranger and wilder, more comfortably fit in the omnivorous art-rock tradition.
Greenwood’s fusion of refinement and insurrection echoes that of his beloved pianist Glenn Gould, who once made a nice observation about the pioneering modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg: “Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.” As Radiohead defied rock convention, so the Smile cannot help but defy Radiohead. Yet defiance, Gould suggests, is the lifeblood of tradition. To defy classicism or rock or a cherished old band may finally preserve their sanctity. The defied thing endures—and then, if we are lucky, defiance provokes it to react” – Pitchfork
Bill Ryder-Jones – Iechyd Da
Release Date: 12th January, 2024
Label: Domino
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/bill-ryder-jones/iechyd-da
Producer: Bill Ryder-Jones
Standout Tracks: If Tomorrow Starts Without Me/I Hold Something in My Hand/Christinha
Key Cut: This Can’t Go On
Review:
“A decade ago, Bill Ryder-Jones made what he would come to think of as the defining record of his career. Then a few years out of The Coral – the band he had co-founded with a group of school friends as a teen, and a solo album deep (an instrumental recording with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra that served as an imaginary soundtrack to Italo Calvino’s novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller) he released A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart.
The album set out Ryder-Jones’ stylistic and thematic stall: songs marked by a remarkable closeness, by the intimacy of place and people. It was a world filled with colloquialisms and gentle wit, where we were all on first-name terms and the geography sat in our marrow. He carried the style further on 2015’s West Kirby County Primary, and through to 2018’s Yawn (and its stunning acoustic companion, Yawny Yawn). Not nostalgia exactly, but a certain squaring with the past – former loves, distant conversations, things he should’ve said or done.
Across his solo catalogue, there has been a kind of wet leaf quality at the heart of many of Ryder-Jones’ songs; something beautiful and sad that seems to cling to the singer. We might trace this to the early loss of his older brother, to his experiences of depression, anxiety and agoraphobia, but wherever its source lies, what it brings to his music is a beguiling elusiveness; the sense that something is halfway gone and just out of reach.
His seventh record, Iechyd Da, follows a five-year gap, in which he spent time producing albums for other artists – among them Michael Head’s Dear Scott, and Brooke Bentham’s Everyday Nothing. The time away has allowed for a certain recalibration, and the singer has said that the new record is an effort to return to the feeling he found in A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart. This desire seems in itself wholly in keeping with Ryder-Jonesian sentiment – a reaching-back, once again, to an earlier time and place. But regardless of its intention, the result is impressive; Iechyd Da is an album that confirms Ryder-Jones as one of Britain’s finest songwriters.
Certainly there are nods to his 2013 album here – a reappearance of the characters Christinha and Anthony, for instance, the return of mixer James Ford, and a track named “A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart Pt 3”. There is also a similarly exploratory approach to style, grown bolder now, perhaps through his own production experience. The record is filled with orchestral swells and sonic oddities, a Gal Costa sample here, a wink to Lou Reed’s Street Hassle there, a children’s chorus, skewed instrumentals. On “…And The Sea…”, Michael Head pops up to read an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses, his rich Scouse tones mixed beneath waves of strings as he makes his way through Molly Bloom’s closing thoughts. It leads to something strangely affecting, like a more disco take on Van Morrison’s “Coney Island”.
Like Head, Ryder-Jones was raised in Merseyside, and still lives in his native West Kirby. He sings with the characteristic melody of the Liverpudlian accent: muffled and mish-mashed, fricative, debuccalised, taking clear relish in his delivery. And so we find the pleasing sing-song of lines such as “From Ant’s to Our’s to Arrowe Park/ Somewhere around the seven-minute mark…” on “Thankfully For Anthony”, or the distinctive Scouse pluralisation of “Oh no I’m feeling blue/And it’s all because of yous…” on “Nothing To Be Done”. It brings a sense of warm informality, as if the accent itself stands among the record’s run of familiar characters.
Ryder-Jones’ voice isn’t quite ASMR-inducing, but it sits soft and low and just at the edge of hearing, as something heard through walls, or in somniferous recline. It catches sometimes, or seems to give out completely, and in these moments the effect is for the listener to lean in even closer.
It’s a neat trick, and Ryder-Jones has a particular gift for experimenting with where sound sits and what effect that can exert on the listener. Where instrumentation dominates, it seems to replicate an intense surge of feeling, burying the singer’s voice, obscuring the lyric, obliterating all. Sometimes, as on “This Can’t Go On”, the music works counter to the subject matter — the old disco trick of a rum tune carrying great sorrow. In the gulf between grows a lurching disorientation, in much the same way as he starts the song walking at night listening to “The Killing Moon”, spurred by the memory of some advice to “get outside, go get some sun.”
What frames this record is a kind of love. The opening track, “I Know That It’s Like This (Baby)” begins as a heady take on romantic love, filled with besotted canoodling and the joy of staying in and watching TV with someone you adore. By the chorus it’s curdling. Ryder-Jones singing of being at once too much and not enough, as the Gal Costa sample, taken from a song that soundtracked that particular relationship, rises and falls.
The track is followed by “A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart Pt 3”, which sees the singer rejecting the lonely advances of an ex, reminding her of their troubled relationship. But above, around, between runs an acknowledgment: “Oh how I loved you.” He sings the line repeatedly, each time resting on the low, heavy vowel of ‘love’, and the simplicity of it grows quietly devastating.
There are other loves here: the ones we’ve hurt, the ones we hope might return, the love of belonging, the surprise of being told you’re beautiful. All the heartfelt moments we still think about, and a dispassionate acknowledgement that, after all, a relationship can simply come to a natural end: “A sun just sank into some sea,” he concludes on “Cristinha”.
But it’s the penultimate track, “Thankfully For Anthony”, that gives the real heart-lurch. One of the album’s standouts, it presents an altogether different kind of loving: this is not hurly-burly romance, but a love marked by constancy and choice. Ryder-Jones finds it among his friends, and even for himself: “And I felt love/I’m still lost, but I know love,” it runs. “And I know loss/But I choose love.” The lines land plum, like a gut-punch.
When Ryder-Jones left The Coral, the band were at the height of their success – five Top 10 albums, critical acclaim, touring with the Arctic Monkeys, a Mercury nomination. But the bigger they became, the more Ryder-Jones, the band’s lead guitarist, seemed to pull in another direction. He became more interested in string arrangements, he grew weary of the demands placed on a commercially successful group, he began to experience panic attacks ahead of live shows.
What he chose instead was a creative life that was altogether more intimate. Success was measured not so much in sales as craftsmanship. The big venues and festival stages were abandoned for smaller rooms. In the studio, he largely worked alone: singer, lyricist, producer. The songs grew closer, truer, tougher.
There have been turbulent moments along the way, of course. But Iechyd Da feels a culmination of all he set out to do. It’s a record that beckons you over and invites you in, that rewards your faith and careful listening with moments of extraordinary beauty, unflinching honesty, a sonic exchange of love” – Uncut
SPRINTS – Letter to Self
Release Date: 5th January, 2024
Label: City Slang
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/sprints-2/letter-to-self
Producer: Daniel Fox
Standout Tracks: Heavy/Shadow of a Doubt/A Wreck (A Mess)
Key Cut: Literary Mind
Review:
“Dublin four-piece Sprints signed to City Slang in 2023, and blast into the New Year with debut album ‘Letter To Self’. Opening with the brooding beats of ‘Ticking’, the vocals of Karla Chubb begin low, full of foreboding. Questioning and self-doubt are apparent from the very beginning, an uncertainty about oneself. The instrumentation builds into an all-encompassing soundscape – a thrilling start which sets the scene for what is to follow. And to hear lyrics in German, the guttural nature of the language fitting perfectly with the atmosphere of the track. Although born in Dublin, Karla Chubb spent part of her early childhood in Germany, initially turning to music as a consequence of feeling out-of-step with the world.
It’s then straight into the scuzzy static-fuelled guitars of ‘Heavy’. The external questions continue: “Do you ever feel like the room is heavy?” they ask. The energy and passion evoked here are raw and true. The lyrics build, eventually exploding in an air of frustration “watching the world go around the window”.
‘Cathedral’ is in a similar vein. There is a darkness here; “Maybe living’s easy / Maybe dying’s the same.” The emotional intensity continues to seep through the music. The combination of Sam McCann’s bass and the guitars of Chubb and Colm O’Reilly combine to create a cacophony of sound, fast and furious.
‘Shaking Their Hands’ takes us to a different place, with its weariness with life. More contemplative, witnesses Chubb deliver a softer vocal. The theme is more thoughtful with the singer “counting the minutes until the clock strikes six” – a sentiment most can connect with. However it’s an intriguing song as the question is inevitably “whose hands?”. ‘Adore, Adore, Adore’ was released as a single and projects the idea of being judged with its question “Do you adore me?” The pace rattles along and its chorus of “they never call me beautiful, they only call me insane” suggests a desire to fit in, to be accepted.
‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ has an eerie start with its haunting plucking guitar chords. Again there is a atmosphere of foreboding, a lack of belonging. The repetition of “I am lost” is gut-wrenching and Chubb builds the tension until the frustration boils over “can you hear me calling?” The sentiment is heart-breaking as it seems to be a call for help, and that wavering guitar chord perfectly evokes the anxiety. Likewise with ‘Can’t Get Enough Of It’, the agitation remains. The inevitable ear-worm of the repeating “This is a living nightmare” is breath-taking, as it combines with the soaring soundscape. The mid-track key change takes the listener by surprise as it punches at the very core with its emotional impact. Perhaps there is a sense here of not being able to be oneself, a lack of self-belief, of security in ones own self-worth. And goodness do those guitar parts add to the overall sense of anxiety.
The sign of a great song is that it still elicits an emotional response long after its initial release. And so it is with the 2022 single ‘Literary Mind’. Re-recorded for ‘Letter To Self’, Sprints have shared that this track has evolved over time. It is pacier than the original single version and is all the better for it. A love song, it relieves the tension felt so far on the album. It’s a song to belt out at the top of your voice, and is thus cathartic for us all. And just listen to McCann’s vocal on the outro, you know Sprints love playing this track. ‘A Wreck (A Mess)’ opens with electrifying guitar riffs and the percussive beats of Jack Callan. The lighter tone set by ‘Literary Mind’ continues. Again lyrically reflective ‘A Wreck (A Mess)’ is delivered with wild abandon, all scuzzy guitars and thunderous drums. The ebb and flow of the pace keeps the listener on their toes, plus lyrics that will live long in the memory including: “is everyone a wreck, is everyone stressed?”
Latest single ‘Up And Comer’ reached the dizzy heights of the 6Music A-list. The opening guitar riffs stops the listener in their tracks every time. And then the full force of ‘Up And Comer’ kicks in and once it reaches top speed you just know it’s not stopping with its full-frontal assault. The chorus is simply electrifying.
The title track closes out ‘Letter To Self’ and it takes a stand against the internal turmoil. “I’ll give as good as I get”. Here there is defiance. The expression is one of hope, of possibility, of coming out from under the weight of expectation, of fighting back. It sees the journey through the album reach its conclusion. Now the lyrics question those who criticise, those whose behaviour is inappropriate. ‘Letter To Self’ states confidently “I am alive” compared to the questioning “am I alive?” from opener ‘Ticking’. It’s a thunderous end, the theme of the track completely different from the rest of the album.
With ‘Letter To Self’ Sprints have produced an album brutally honest and personal. They have not been afraid to express the feeling of being an outsider, of looking for validation, of attempting to overcome self-doubt. The human condition and thus society is complex and difficult to navigate but Sprints have not been afraid to express uncertainty and vulnerability. And all the while they have enveloped these themes in the most glorious noise for us all to find comfort and lose ourselves in.
Is it possible to have an album of the year contender on only the first week in? Of course it is. 9/10” – CLASH
Crawlers – The Mess We Seem to Make
Release Date: 16th February, 2024
Label: Polydor
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/crawlers/the-mess-we-seem-to-make
Producer: Pete Robinson
Standout Tracks: Better If I Just Pretend/Come Over (Again) /I End Up Alone
Key Cut: Would You Come to My Funeral
Review:
“Crawlers arrive with their long-awaited debut album not on hands and knees, but with strident purpose and fractured hearts beating out of their chests. It’s understandable. Having blown up on TikTok and been invited out on tour with giants like My Chemical Romance and YUNGBLUD, the Liverpudlian quartet have every reason to be overloaded with strident self-belief, but the striking vibrancy and surging energy with which they translate it to these 12 tracks is utterly remarkable.
There’s little time for looking in the rearview mirror. Yes, mega-hit 2021 single Come Over (Again) makes the tracklist – its grungy, hooky, melancholy brilliance shines as brilliantly here as it on each of the tens of millions of streams already racked up – but this is an album built for the road ahead.
As pumping opener Meaningless Sex thrusts into the fuzzy Kiss Me, their meld of vulnerability and intimacy with stadium-ready composition continues to bear fruit. Hit It Again proves a willingness to crank the heaviness when the moment calls. The brilliant Would You Come to My Funeral is a teasing lyrical masterclass with a pulsing bassline and soaring chorus that are impossibly full of life.
For a band who broke out on attention-deficit social media, Crawlers command the long-form with no lack of substance and impressive pacing. The mournful, piano-driven Golden Bridge finds room to sprawl and fully develop mid-album. The probing Kills Me To Be Kind loses nothing for sitting alongside their breakout hit, painting a picture of how the band have grown up since. The tentative alt. pop of Call It Love wears the influence of icons like PJ Harvey and Fiona Apple on its sleeve before heart-rending closer Nighttime Affair delivers a masterclass in theatrical understatement.
Perhaps most impressive is how this is a record destined to delight not just Crawlers’ fans – the affectionately named Creepy Crawlies – but pretty much anyone whose earways it happens to invade. The, ahem, crawl to superstardom is well underway. Verdict: 4/5” – Kerrang!