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| Photo - Lawrence Watson |
Silver Man, the musical alias of music industry veteran David Silverman, returns with his evocative new single 'Paint Me In Gold', released yesterday 17 July via 3 Bar Fire Records.
Best known as the founder of Outpost Media and head of 3 Bar Fire Records, David Silverman has spent decades championing independent and major artists alike. In 2005, he launched Outpost Media, a music PR agency and digital distribution company that has worked with acclaimed labels including Warp, Sony, Def Jux, and !K7, as well as artists such as Diplo, Mr Scruff, Nightmares On Wax, Skream, Example, and Pitbull. Having successfully guided the business through the challenges of the pandemic years, Silverman has since found renewed creative space to return to his first passion: making music.
With his new single, 'Paint Me In Gold', Silver Man opens with atmospheric synth textures and a cathartic spoken-word vocal, gradually unfolding into a compelling breakbeat-driven journey. The carefully curated words sit atop immersive production, creating an atmosphere that feels simultaneously eerie, reflective, and uplifting. As the track develops, moments of tension give way to calm, drawing listeners deeper into the world Silver Man creates through sound.
Discussing the origins of the vocal, he explains: "I found the vocals randomly on Reddit - a sample CD guy had uploaded them from a Scottish poet called Cass and said they were free to use. They were all jumbled up, and I re-arranged them into some sort of meaning. So there is still a mystery as to who Cass actually is. I would like to meet her!" At its core, 'Paint Me In Gold' explores the transformative power of perception and the stories we assign to our experiences. Through poetic lines such as "the cracks stopped being wounds, they became windows" and "even broken things remember the shape of their becoming", the track reflects on resilience, growth, and finding beauty in imperfection.
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Fifteen pop songs about animals, featuring 15 of the best indiepop bands in the world. Pets Sounds is as simple as that. Ranging from the playful (Sassyhiya, Gay Skeleton Club) to the heartbreaking (Caleb Nichols, Jetstream Pony) to the enigmatic (Railcard, Oh Hippo) to the satiric (The Magnetic Fields, Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires), there’s more diversity on this album than you can shake a stick at. Or throw a bone at.
Musicians spend a lot of time working at home, with their pets for company. The animals sit around, happy in their own worlds, sublimely indifferent to their humans’ earnest musical endeavours. As familiar as family members, but as unknowable as aliens, pets are the perfect muse. They can be treated as objects of adoration – ‘Rufus’ by Tugboat Captain is an expression of pure joy – or they can be treated as metaphors. More reliable than lovers but less dangerous than heroin, pets are a great vehicle for singing obliquely about something else. Swansea Sound’s ‘I Don’t Like Men In Uniform’ is about an ageing, irascible terrier, but it’s also about men striving to maintain their potency as territorial aggressors. The Magnetic Fields’ Fido is a libidinous and unreliable partner, as well as a dog that likes sniffing other dogs’ private parts.
For the most part, animals come off better than humans on this album. In ‘Kings Of The Animal Kingdom’, The Burning Hell dramatise our indulgent love of pets in order to expose our cruelty to other human beings. In ‘Bo’s New Haircut’, The Cords express the injustice and unfairness of an innocent animal having to submit to human demands. In ‘Crayon Potato’ by Sassyhiya, the magnificent Crayon contemptuously rejects the gifts offered by her besotted human owners.
In ‘Lola’, the opening track, Lande Hekt tries to put this enigmatic human-animal relationship into words. And concludes that however much we love our animals, and no matter how much we manage to communicate with them, we can never really know them. A melancholy conclusion maybe, but the music – as with all the songs on this album – is expressive of the wonderment and the joy that comes from sharing your life with a member of another species. The tracks by Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires, Jetstream Pony and Railcard are previously unreleased.
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This spring, the debut single by Kay Oz & The Mojo was played more than 500 times on indie radio stations around the world. The follow-up comes in the form of “Danse”. On their new single, Kay Oz & The Mojo surprise listeners with a light-footed, swinging sound. “The song is a charming invitation to dance – in French! Drawing on chanson influences, it musically portrays seduction and communication between two lovers. It grooves and swings with a deliberate vintage feel,” the band says.
For Andreas Frei (guitarist and the musical mastermind behind Kay Oz & The Mojo), the song is an opportunity to indulge his love of swing music from the 1930s to the 1960s. Together with Katharina Müller (Kay Oz; vocals and various instruments), he creates moments that recall Hillbilly Moon Explosion.
And as the title suggests, “Danse” is impossible to resist. It is no surprise that the track has already become one of the audience favourites at the band’s live shows. Their musicianship is no coincidence: over the past few years, Kay Oz & The Mojo first earned their stripes as a cover band with an extensive repertoire before turning to writing original songs.
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We don't feature that many specific covers on Beehive Candy however when there this good, then why not? "Never Let Me Down Again" is one of Depeche Mode’s great songs — a dark, hypnotic anthem built on a promise and a threat intertwined. Entrusting it to Flavia Coelho, a Brazilian singer whose voice carries the full light of Rio, was a conscious risk.
The result is a version that does not betray the original but illuminates it differently: sunny on the surface, tense beneath. Bossa nova and new wave, two melancholies that recognize each other, between Rio and England.
"Never Let Me Down Again" feat. Flavia Coelho is the second single taken from A Date with Depeche Mode, Nouvelle Vague’s upcoming album out October 30, on Kwaidan Records / [PIAS] Recordings.
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Furthering a string of emotionally rich releases, Scarlett Macfarlane shares “Ever After,” a warm, cinematic pop single that explores the quiet struggle of staying present in a life that always feels one step ahead. Uplifting, nostalgic, and gently anthemic, the track turns introspection into something expansive and hopeful, capturing the beauty of learning to slow down and simply exist inside the moment.
At its core, “Ever After” reflects Scarlett’s tendency to move quickly through life, always looking toward what comes next before fully arriving in the now. The song becomes a personal reminder to pause, breathe, and actually inhabit the experiences she’s spent so long chasing. “I often feel like I’ve never ‘done’ anything because by the time I finish something I’m already thinking about the next thing,” Scarlett explains. “This song is meant to be a gentle reminder to stay in the present.”
The title draws inspiration from Scarlett’s relationship with storytelling and her love of books, particularly the idea of “happily ever after.” Rather than seeing it as an ending, she reframes it as a beginning; a place where conflict gives way to presence, connection, and appreciation for the quieter beauty of fulfillment. “I love books with happy endings,” she shares. “But I hate that they often end right when everything gets good. I think the part when people have achieved their goals and attained happiness can potentially be the best part of the story.”
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| Photo - Matt Mehlan |
HIGHSIGH have just shared their single "Don't Crowd the Eye" ahead of their debut album 'Once Bend,' out July 31st on Joyful Noise Recordings. In early conversations about their new project HIGHSIGH, Ro(b)//ert Lundberg (JOBS), John Dieterich (Deerhoof), and Matt Mehlan (Skeletons) imagined the band as a drum trio made up of non-drummers. "Like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, I love the idea of bands where everyone is trying something outside their area of expertise," Matt Mehlan says.
While ultimately not how the band proceeded, that rhythmic impulse remains at the core of their music, especially on their single "Don't Crowd the Eye," which is driven by a particular, shifting polyrhythmic sensibility. On this track Matt Mehlan lent lyrics and vocals. "Lyrically, I’m interested in simple moments of revelation – what’s the environment, what’s the feeling?" he says. "Which also feels like a theme across this album."
Their debut album, Once Bend, presents as both disarmingly familiar and a strangely opaque patchwork of mutant pop and abstract polyrhythmic soundscapes. Created in a collage-like fashion, each member brought in deceptively rich musical fragments that had been cast aside from other projects, almost like little question marks for the other members to decipher and interpret. The initial ideas were all rhythmic and percussive. In an early conversation, Ro, John, and Matt discussed the possibility of the three non-drummers making a drum trio record—like the spirit of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the idea of a band in which everyone is operating outside their area of expertise.
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