Toso Toso - Toso Toso

Based in NYC, avant-pop quartet Toso Toso were drawn together in 2020 through their common backgrounds in improv and individual talents in leftfield composition. Their debut album is both emotionally impactful and intellectually engaging, as fluent in modern minimalism and jazz as it is in electronic pop, while switching effortlessly between monochrome and saturated colour, bristling tension and calm. 

The sweet, skyscraping capability of Isabel Crespo Pardo’s voice – which calls to mind Julia Holter and Astrud Gilberto – is the focus of these tracks. Structures, which variously bend, are deconstructed and reassembled around it, with no grandstanding from any one player. 

Entrancement beckons at every step: the set bursts into life with ‘cLAcLAcLA’, a slice of playful glitch-pop that recalls Russian producer Kate NV, then changes tack for ‘Iluvia de Meteoritos’, which reflects the cosmic wonder of its title (Meteor Shower) via a field of luminous bossa and art-pop. Especially intriguing are the epic ‘Corre Que Corre’, with its eruption of boshing bass and, at the other end of the spectrum, ‘En La Lengua’, characterised by a seesawing rhythm and melancholic piano wanderings.

Label: Leaving Records

Celeste

Woman Of Faces

In 2020, Brighton-raised Celeste Waite seemed poised for huge success. She’d won both the Brits’ Rising Star Award and the BBC Sound Of… poll, and her debut album topped the charts a few months later. A second release might have seemed imminent - instead we had a four-year hiatus between 2021’s smash-hit Not Your Muse, and the newly released Woman of Faces.

It’s a risky gap, but Woman Of Faces is a potent reassertion of Celeste’s talent, with its jazz-soul foundations – think Billie Holiday, Etta James and Nina Simone –  sleek, modern production and deeply reflective, often anguished lyrics. Born out of a painful breakup and corresponding crisis of selfhood, these songs shed the bruised glamour of her early material for something rawer and more challenging, without ever tipping into misery. Her voice is immensely powerful but also nuanced, both technically and emotionally, whether in brooding, cinematic ballads like ‘On With The Show’, which exposes the relentless demands placed on (especially female) artists and the Portishead-ish ‘This Is Who I Am’, or the startling curveball that is ‘Could Be Machine’, with its trance-pop synths and frantic, hammered beats. A woman of faces, indeed.  

Label: Polydor

Noura Mint Seymali

Yenbett

Tinariwen, Tamikrest, Imarhan and Mdou Moctar have all helped popularise ‘desert blues’ well beyond their Sahelian homelands, putting an individual stamp on fusions of Western rock, blues and Tuareg folk traditions. The region’s female musicians have perhaps found it harder to achieve international renown, but Noura Mint Seymali’s latest album should seal her status as a heavy-hitting, modern griot working indigenous music into exciting new shapes.

A powerhouse vocalist who’s also a skilled player of the ardin, a kind of harp specific to her Mauritanian home, Seymali fronts a band whose guitarist (also her husband) plays sinuous arabesques as well as gnarly riffs, while percussion does much of the rhythmic heavy lifting. All this is superbly showcased on Yenbett (meaning “it grows” in Arabic), which was co-produced by the drummer, with Mdou Moctar’s bassist. 

The album runs to 15 tracks, including some brief, experimental intervals which act as resets of pacing and mood. Picking highlights is hard but among them are the joyful, hypnotic ‘Guéreh’, which reinterprets a traditional wedding dance via the twangle of interlaced strings, and ‘Lebleida’, where Seymali’s commandingly athletic voice is paired with fuzzed-out, 70s blues-rock guitar and a Bonham-style drums wallop.

Label: Glitterbeat 

Danny Brown

Stardust

Literary critic Cyril Connolly’s oft repeated phrase, “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway”, presented parenthood as the ultimate enemy of creativity. In the run-up to his sixth album, however, musician Danny Brown admitted to fearing a very different kind of threat to his art – sobriety.

The Detroit rapper and songwriter had long been lyrically upfront about his addiction and post-rehab anxiety is understandable, but Stardust – the first record he’s made completely sober – shows that it was entirely unwarranted. Not only has he turned the experience into a powerfully personal theme, inhabiting the character of an artist called Dusty Star to tell his newly positive story, he’s also let go of any reins on his hyperpop sensibility, to dazzling, if at times confounding effect.

The album is packed with guests, including glitchcore/rave-pop duo Frost Children, digital hardcore artist Femtanyl, and art-pop auteur Quadeca – who each provide welcome complements and/or contrasts. ‘Lift You Up’, a vocal-house number which sees Brown frustrated in his efforts to elevate a dejected friend/partner, is a polar opposite of the rapid-fire bass music of ‘Copycats’, but both offer some standout moments.

Label: Warp