Kim Deal
Nobody Loves You More
Kim Deal has been making music for over five decades, as bassist, songwriter and co-vocalist with the influential group Pixies, at the helm of the Breeders, which she co-founded with her twin sister in 1989, and with experimental project The Amps.
Her debut solo album comes following a busy year, in which Deal released a series of seven-inch singles, and supported a 30th anniversary edition of the Breeders Last Splash album with headline performances across the US and UK.
All this meant the album had a fitful gestation, though you’d never guess as much. Its 11 tracks, which feature contributions from two Breeders, among others, is by turns sweetly melodic and enthusiastically rowdy: a mix of her characteristically artful, skewed pop, soulful alt-rock and gnarly noise-rock with electronic blurts.
Added to this familiar song language are strings of a seductively vintage kind (notably on ‘Summerland’), as well as brass (on the easy-rolling ‘Coast’) and pedal-steel guitar (on the yearning ‘Are You Mine’). There are also echoes of The Amps’ music, notably in ‘Crystal Breath’ and ‘Bats In The Afternoon Sky’.
“I don’t know where I am and I don’t care,” are Deal’s first words on the opening title track: from the evidence presented here, it seems she is in her effortless prime…
Label: 4AD
Nukuluk
stillworld
Experimental hip-hop quartet Nukuluk have been steadily generating heat since debuting in 2021 with the track ‘Ooh Ah’ – an enticingly mardy hybrid of broken beats, malevolently throbbing bass lines, gaseous synths and soft, vocal melodicism, overlaid with urgently spat bars.
Their debut album stillworld follows two EPs, Disaster Pop and Superglue - and looks set to further ignite the buzz that surrounds them. At seven tracks, the album is short – the group have been calling it a mixtape, rather than an album – but there is an entire, intriguing world inside each one, be it impressionistic almost to the point of hallucinatory collage or structured along more conventional song lines.
Together, singer/guitarist Syd, rapper Monika, Mateo (on bass) and Louis (drums) are committed to delivering “something that’s true”, which explains the shifting moods and the freewheeling across genres from ambient to post punk, hip hop, indie rock, R&B and glitch-metal, with production that betrays a suck-it-and-see confidence. An enveloping and intimate, at times claustrophobic place, stillworld can’t help but impress, from ‘Hand On Hilt’, which suggests a dank basement hook-up between Actress and The National to ‘Warm’, a sticky, slow-mo serving of R&B-pop cut with post-rock guitar twangling.
Mount Eerie
Night Palace
There are few clearer indications of the singular nature of US singer/songwriter and producer Phil Elverum’s vision than his release of an entire record of stems – the individual studio tracks that comprise a song – at the same time as the new album they shaped. It’s an act consistent with his intensely personal, experi-rock/alt-pop recordings over the past 20 years as Mount Eerie and before that, as cultish lo-fi maverick Microphones.
Night Palace, the album proper, is a 26-track sprawl which marks a new life chapter for Elverum, moving him on from the serial grief and despair that shaped his four extraordinary albums from 2017–2020. It looks out into the world with a calmly observational gaze rather than relentlessly inward, but this doesn’t mean its songs are all melodic sweetness and light. Alongside the spry, Go-Betweens-like lilt of ‘Broom Of Wind’ and ‘I Need New Eyes’’s slow-mo, mutant shoegaze sit the 52 seconds of cacophonous black-metal that makeup track ‘Swallowed Alive’, and ‘Non-Metaphorical Decolonization’, a head-down, alt-rock churn edged with synth. It’s an ambitious record fully under Elverum’s control, further underlining his status as an indie auteur.
Label: P.W. Elverum & Sun
Jennifer Castle
Camelot
Hang a “feels” tag on this Canadian country/folk artist at your peril: she’s likely to unexpectedly contradict it two songs later. This isn’t unusual – variegated emotion is part of popular music’s job description, but the degree to which mood changes define Castle’s latest album reveals her as a compellingly different, borderline eccentric talent.
Camelot is her seventh LP and deserves to deliver more exposure than that granted by the use of her languid piano ballad ‘Blowing Kisses’ in an episode of acclaimed drama series The Bear. Despite the title, this is not a concept album based on Arthurian legend (praise be), though its songs do touch on mystical and astrological themes and have an otherworldly air.
She makes a point or three about institutional power in track ‘Trust’, lays her upbeat, folk-pop vocal over a 60s-sounding electronic backdrop in ‘Mary Miracle’, and lets rip with a barn-dance holler alongside crunchy guitar vamp on ‘Full Moon in Leo’ - whilst at other points sounding like a rural Lou Reed with gospel leanings.
Her voice is athletic yet soulful, her band simpático to the songs’ unusual emotional and stylistic shifts. There are no fables then, but some quite fabulous music instead…
Label: Paradise of Bachelors
