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This year has seen Ruthie make a compelling introduction, which culminated with the release of her debut EP ‘Universal Heartbreak Now’. She’s recently been named as One To Watch by both The Observer and HMV, which adds to radio support at Radio 1, Beats 1, 6 Music and BBC Introducing, plus playlists including Spotify’s New Music Friday UK, Amazon’s Fresh Indie plus Dazed, NME and DIY.
Now Ruthie shares a new lyric video for the EP’s closing track ‘Twenty Forty Seven’. While ‘Universal Heartbreak Now’ focuses on the finer details as a relationship slowly unravels, this instead reflects on the aftermath. The pain might not be as overwhelming as was expected, but there’s still nostalgia and a yearning for what might’ve been. The song allows Ruthie’s emotive vocal to take centre-stage, with a sparse backdrop of slide guitar, understated piano and stripped back percussion
"‘Twenty Forty Seven’ is about the stories that we tell ourselves after a break up,” explains Ruthie. “We imagine that we’ll never find love again, and instead linger every evening in Tesco, waiting for an ex to show up. These stories play in our heads like old B-movies, implausible and ridiculous but very real."
Ruthie also used that idea for the track’s accompanying lyric video. She made the visual by constructing a collage of clips from various low-budget retro horrors, in the process crafting a playfully OTT backdrop for her revealingly honest lyrics.
Having recently supported Shura and The Magic Gang, Ruthie ends the year by playing London’s Servant Jazz Quarters ahead of a homecoming show at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds. She’s also just confirmed her first festival date for 2020 at Hit The North, with a whole host of shows to be follow next year.
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World/Inferno Friendship Society are back with a new single from their upcoming All Borders are Porous to Cats LP. The album is set to be released on January 17th 2020 via Alternative Tentacles. In addition to a New Years Eve show in Brooklyn, you can catch the band on tour throughout January and February!
World/Inferno Friendship Society's long awaited new album dares you to try and decipher it’s multi-layered, encrypted message, while dragging you kicking and screaming through a succession of flashbacks, alternate realities and drug and alcohol induced delusions. While World / Inferno is known for its utter disregard for boundaries of genre, All Borders are Porous to Cats deliberately pushes the limits of what could possibly be perceived as punk rock. It scores tales of fugitives, arson, larceny, perjury, drug addiction and freedom with elements of soul, funk, latin, polka, and classical music, as well as World /Inferno’s signature punk cabaret sound. 3 years in the making, 4 missed release dates, 5 lost band members, many a bridge burned, and a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen, The World /Inferno Friendship Society invites you to enjoy the fruits of their perpetual torment.
Take it as a promise, and a patent fact: All Borders Are Porous to Cats. The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s 7th full-length LP finds the collective reset and reinvigorated, behind the lyrics of Jack Terricloth, apparent possessor of the punk rock fountain of everlasting style and rage. The album follows Cat in the Hat (no relation), an undocumented refugee who is framed for a crime and requires the assistance of a ragtag gang of miscreants, academics, orchestra-caliber musicians, and radical insurgents—sometimes art does in fact imitate life!
First single “Freedom is a Wilderness” was fitting first available on an a compilation benefitting Chelsea Manning upon her initial release. The band is uncertain if New Romantic 2 Tone ska is an available generic distinction, but they damn well gave it a shot, and the haunting echo of “who woulda thought?” reminds the listener that for political prisoners like Manning, freedom is a relative concept at best. Upcoming single “Nightmares” improbably adds to the list of genres the band attempts, offering a horn and gang vocal driven shuffle somewhere between Fela Kuti and Elvis Costello. The remainder of the album sees the band at its most expansive musically—covering everything from Bowie-esque ballads to Balkan punk stomps—and inflammatory lyrically, with tales of romance, righteous indignation, and resistance.
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Building up to the release of their latest album - Hard Times is out January 17th 2020 (CRC Records) - Whyte Horses have just released a new single featuring guest vocals from La Roux. The track is a cover of "Mister Natural", originally by the Bee Gees from their album of the same name released in 1974 (styled as Mr. Natural).
Speaking about the collaboration and choice of track, Whyte Horses frontman Dom Thomas shares: “I vividly remember watching a Bee Gees documentary late one night. By the time it got to the mid seventies era the band were talking about how everything was going wrong and they were close to quitting. It cut to some footage of a gig in Melbourne which was meant to be a low point but my ears pricked up when I heard the first few bars of Mister Natural. It was one of the best Bee Gees numbers I'd heard, right up there with Massachusetts and the golden sixties era ballads, in my mind this was an instant classic.
“I sent it to Elly and we decided to do a version at our Royal Festival Hall gig. It's one of those songs we both just connected with and we thought we should record it, this was before the idea of doing an album of covers, maybe it sparked the idea. “It's got a certain charm that's hard to quantify like all the best Bee Gees songs, it's melancholic and a little bit melodramatic" Whilst Elly Jackson (La Roux) adds: “Me and Dom share a love of this song, so it was a lovely opportunity to work with him on the track”
Whyte Horses are an elusive, psychedelic dream-pop collective from Manchester and Hard Times is a “fantasy mixtape”, shape-shifting and re-imagining songs from an eclectic mix of musical backgrounds. Alongside La Roux, an esteemed list of vocal collaborators guest throughout the record from Badly Drawn Boy to Chrysta Bell (Twin Peaks), Gruff Rhys to Melanie Pain (Nouvelle Vague) and more. The album’s grandiose title track features guest vocals from John Grant and was released alongside the album’s announcement earlier this year.
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“A few years ago, I basically rolled straight off a tour bus and through the double glass doors of a massive office block to start a new job. It was a shock. I worked for endless hours in that place, often well into the night, calculating figures and writing emails at the heart of the corporate machine” says Stephanie Davin, lead singer of exciting five-piece art-rock band, Post Louis. The band garnered critical acclaim for a string of singles sporadically released throughout the last 18 months, and now their iridescent debut album is announced for release on 28th Feb 2020, with lead single and title track Descender.
Descender is about the churn and confusion of working through the day and the night and then back into the daylight, and what this does to one’s mind, body and relationships. “I don’t think people talk about labour enough in pop music, but almost all the musicians I know have done the strangest and most varied jobs alongside making music” says Davin.
And this is the driving force that lies at the heart of the album. Desperate exhaustion – both through mental and physical labour. While the band's previous EPs - This Could Be a Bridge and Uptight were preoccupied with the ways in which people can damage one other, Descender extends this gaze, taking in questions about love, labour, effort and blame.
Written from the perspective of a young woman internalising the effects of the Me Too movement – a burning rage, suppressed by the daily grind of life. “A couple of Christmases ago I was feeling overwhelmed by all the turmoil produced by the courageous disclosures in the Me Too movement. The Brock Turner witness statement had been published in the summer of 2016. That act of bravery occupied my mind, alongside a relentless looping mental image that I couldn’t shake, of Emily Doe (Chanel Miller) lying in the road. I wanted to link that image to the idea of heat, rage and being burnt out - whether by work or aspiration or fury. Fiery anger is often apt, but it can be exhausting as well as empowering.”
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Multi-faceted musician and actor Michael Malarkey (The Vampire Diaries, Project Blue Book) unveils another dose of indie-laden Americana with ‘Shake The Shiver’, the second single from his upcoming second full-length album, ‘Graveracer’ due for release on 10th January 2020 via Cap on Kat/Kartel. Alongside standard DL, CD and LP, the album is available as a limited signed LP and CD format for pre-order here.
Ahead of the album release, Michael will play an exclusive in-store show at Kingston’s Banquet Records on 8th January. Fans can purchase a copy of the album with tickets from Banquet Records' website. The talented artist has also announced an extensive UK and European headline tour, kicking off at Manchester’s Deaf Institute on 9th January and coming to London’s Bush Hall on 10th January. To buy tickets please visit Michael Malarkey Official.
Written in Michael’s trailer between filming Project Blue Book, ‘Shake The Shiver’ was conceived on Arturia’s KeyStep - which combines step sequencing with keyboard control – to layer the sounds and melodies he wanted before heading into the studio to re-record them, although some of the original demo sounds made it through to the final cut.
Best known as the charismatic Enzo in the CW’s television series The Vampire Diaries and Captain Michael Quinnin Robert Zemeckis’ executively produced Project Blue Book for History. The British-American talent has simultaneously cultivated a body of work that established him as a distinctive and captivating crossover talent, winning over audiences in both the music and acting arenas.
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Irish composer Alex Dowling today shared new single and video “King of Thumbs” from his forthcoming debut album Reality Rounds, due out January 31st, 2020 via Carrier Records.
Reality Rounds was written for four vocalists (who each use customized wireless controllers to manipulate their AutoTuned voices in real-time) and synthesizer (performed by Grammy-nominated composer/pianist Pascal Le Bouef). The album was recorded and filmed live, and in full, at Princeton University by Four/Ten Media.
Dowling built “King of Thumbs” around an imagined deck of cards that the performers recite at the beginning of this ritual. Halfway through, a startling interruption transports the listener to a new sonic environment where the choir’s whistling is transformed into a flickering texture, a type of artificial birdsong. The music has echoes of Aphex Twin or Oneohtrix Point Never seen through the prism of Bjork’s Medúlla.
The full album and video of Reality Rounds will be released digitally and on CD January 31st, 2020 via Carrier Records.
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