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| Photo - Joshua Tate |
Selve - Breaking Outta Heaven (EP).
Multi-award-winning Gold Coast (Yugambeh/Kombumerri)-based alternative six-piece Selve, led by proud Jabirr Jabirr man Loki Liddle release Breaking Outta Heaven, the companion EP to their history-making, internationally praised 2025 album Breaking Into Heaven: the first LP by an Aboriginal artist ever to be recorded at Abbey Road Studios. The EP - featuring focus track 'Run Boy Run' expands the album's prismatic universe with adventurous new colours and thrilling spaces in the band's uniquely playful-yet-esoteric way.
Liddle explains, "we broke into heaven [which] may indeed just be a big old trap we’ll need to wrestle our way out of in the end". Also including previous singles 'Creature of the Night' and 'Desire', the EP draws from Liddle's own book release earlier this week Damn Good Television out now via Magabala Books. Another stop on the Selve sonic rollercoaster EP focus track 'Run Boy Run' chugs breathlessly along a dark bassline with a mysterious-yet-heroic, cinematic energy almost akin to the anime intros the band grew up loving, featuring flourishes of 80s-esque synth-pop that shifts irregularly into verse and chorus; all made rewardingly earnest with Liddle's soaring vocals.
Lyrically dense and somewhat of a cousin to 2025 album focus 'Leading Man Lost'; the track digs further into the Breaking Outta Heaven EP's themes of getting lost in the sauce, the pursuit of big dreams, the subversion of the cult of celebrity while echoing one of the project's core sentiments “You said it’s made of matter, I said it’s made of love” - and, as Liddle so esoterically explains, "the idea that we all might die waiting for our train to come - another reminder that our desire can be our liberation and our cage. And that it takes art to walk that line with grace".
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| Photo - Andreas Weiss |
Jörn Schlüter has been recording his songs for his band Someday Jacob for twelve years. Fifty-five songs, four albums, one EP. A new album by the Bremen/Hamburg Americana band is in the works. But something else is happening first – Schlüter has made a solo album. At the beginning of 2024, a repertoire unexpectedly emerged from nowhere. "Normally I first have one song from which the entire album flows," says Schlüter, "but these songs came in one go. They hung together like a flock of chickens that someone forgot in the fields they needed a home."
These songs were written during a moment of crisis – Schlüter spent a lot of time with an old acquaintance – anxiety. "She's a good friend, but sometimes she stays too long," he says, "like the last guest at a party who doesn't understand that the hosts want to go to bed. It took a while to make that clear to her." Such challenging times are part of Schlüter's biography. He is familiar with them and wants to see them as an invitation to integrate what has not yet been integrated.
That's how you can grow. Not so much to become better, faster, fitter and more productive. But in such a way that you get one step closer to yourself. The songs on "The Other Mile" reflect such considerations. "For me, songwriting is like a milky mirror," says Schlüter, "I polish it until I can recognize myself – or at least the part of me that the song is about. You put something of yourself out there so that others can do something with. Perhaps they see themselves in it."
In the fall of 2024, the songwriter called two friends to record the resulting music. Matthias Meusel, who is best known for being Roger Cicero's drummer for 20 years. Stephan Gade, who plays with Niels Frevert and sometimes with Udo Lindenberg. During the crisis Schlüter listened to Neil Young's 1974 album "Comes A Time" on repeat. He realized that he wanted similarly reduced arrangements for the new songs. Drums, bass, acoustic guitars. "I felt something gentle, but also something rooted," Schlüter describes, "in my head it was always Matthias and Stephan playing these songs."
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| Photo - Christel Lanthier |
A full decade after intentionally disbanding, Federal Lights return better than ever, with their new (and third) album Celebration of Failure, (Aporia Records), which was released yesterday June 19th. Starting in 2010, Jean-Guy Roy built his band Federal Lights slowly, stubbornly, with a lot of himself in it. From Winnipeg, they carved a sound and a following that crossed oceans. They toured Germany. They made records that mattered. They stood on stages in cities that had no reason to care and made them care. Roy had a vision of what Federal Lights should be, but somewhere along the way, by 2016, the distance between that and the reality became too heavy to carry – not because the band had failed, but because he’d decided it had. Roy turned off all the Federal Lights: social media accounts, gone; the digital footprint of years, deleted; all of it vanishing into the ether.
Eventually, Roy found that he couldn’t delete the part of himself that needs to make music, any more than he could delete a lung. In the post-band silence, he didn’t find relief, but absence. Eventually, the absence asked, “Now what?” The answer was a reckoning, not a resurrection. Roy turned the Federal Lights back on.
The result, Celebration of Failure, offers deep, authentic explorations of the vulnerable emotional states encountered on this long journey of destruction and rebuilding. Deploying few but well-chosen words in each song, Federal Lights move through desperation, obsession, depression, escape, defeat, loss, and ultimately, redemption through choice. The sound is anthemic, atmospheric rock – with compelling synth and treated-electric-guitar textures – that would fit neatly on a playlist beside Radiohead, Brian Eno, and Arcade Fire.
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This summer HMS Morris will be releasing their first new music since 2023's Dollar Lizard Money Zombie. Their new single is called Bwletin Brys, a driving, angular, sci-fi frolic about eco-aliens taking over the management of Earth. It combines a gritty drums/bass/guitar rhythm section with inter-galactic vocal processing and a dazzling range of blipdy-blops. Its effect has been described as 'comparable to having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick'. "It's Sparks x Adult DVD, channeled through a 21st century woman raised in Carmarthenshire."
Bwletin Brys ('Emergency Transmission') begins with an overwhelmingly powerful spaceship settling in Earth's orbit and transmitting the message that humans' mismanagement of the planet will no longer be tolerated. The normal wake-up calls in a case like this (climate instability and species loss) have effectively been ignored. Even dispatching one of their agents to lead the human counter-movement (Greta Thunberg) has proved ineffective. Regime change is the appropriate next step.
The song channels the lightness and glee of Hitchhikers Guide, but the rapid leap forward in artificial intelligence technology over the last few years brings an element of urgency to the questions raised. Would we be better off if human's weren't in charge? Should we be happy to hand over control of Earth to a species/entity that prioritizes ecological harmony over cheap smartphones and beef?
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Uncle Lucius - Election Day.
Phosphorescent - If I Could Only Fly.
Lost Art Records has just announced a new Blaze Foley tribute album "Sittin' with Blaze" with a double single by Uncle Lucius covering "Election Day" and Phosphorescent's version of "If I Could Only Fly." The compilation includes new recordings by Phosphorescent, Willie Watson, Lucy Dacus, Cactus Lee, Dylan Earl, Uncle Lucius, Riley Downing, Joshua Ray Walker, Twain, Angela Autumn, John R. Miller, John Moreland, and Lucinda Williams. The album will be released digitally on August 7, 2026 with a physical release to follow in the fall.
Sittin’ With Blaze showcases an assemblage of thirteen contemporary songwriters covering classic early Blaze recordings from his ‘tree house’ days in Georgia. Those recordings were originally released by Lost Art Records as Sittin’ by the Road in 2010 culled from demos recorded by Blaze in the mid-1970s.
At the time of Blaze’s tragic murder in 1989 he was little known outside of Austin’s renegade songwriter circles. He is now revered among the pantheon of Texas’ great songwriters. Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Willliams both penned moving tributes to Blaze and his songs been covered by John Prine, Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett, Billy Strings, and Willie Nelson. This project's goal is to share Blaze’s music with a new audience who appreciates masterful songwriting.
Writer Joe Nick Patoski, who contributed the liner notes to the forthcoming release writes, “The songs Blaze created resonate and ring truer than ever. The hallmark of a great song is outliving its author. In Blaze’s case, there’s a whole catalog of songs like that.”
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