SOHN: Rennen

13th January 2017

"Captivating" - Q
"An ideal January album." - The Sunday Times
"Dramatic and thoughtfully crafted." - FT

For his follow-up to 2014 debut Tremors, London-born SOHN traded Vienna for the warmth of Los Angeles, but the influence of his former home still lingers (Rennen is a German verb meaning 'to run'). Resuming a nocturnal schedule - as he did with Tremors - SOHN spent a month writing alone in northern California, recording until the morning. An exercise in restraint, SOHN used only a handful of musical elements on each track, allowing the spotlight to shine on the vocals, melodies and rhythms.

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Bing & Ruth: No Home of the Mind

17th February 2017

"Sheer atmospheric beauty" - The Times
"Strikes a chord without uttering a word" - Resident Advisor
"Warm and full and unprecedented." - Spin

Operating since 2006 with David Moore at its nucleus, Bing & Ruth's third album No Home of the Mind was released earlier this year on 4AD. After a year of heartfelt composition and with everything meticulously rehearsed in advance, it was recorded in two days and in the fewest takes possible in an attempt to recreate the immediacy of classic session-style musicianship, where one-take recordings were a standard to keep costs down. The final, stunning album explores piano's percussive qualities alongside running woodwinds, warbling tape delays and splattered upright bass lines that stare out with a wide-eyed transcendence.

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Methyl Ethel: Everything Is Forgotten

3rd March 2017

A tight, exciting, stonker of an album" - Loud & Quiet
a lithe, sinewy creature, by turns weighted and buoyant, half darkness and half shimmering light" - DIY

Methyl Ethel's second full-length, Everything is Forgotten is a vivid, compelling and mysterious creature, all curvaceous pop nuggets and enigmatic currents. Written and recorded by Perth-based frontman Jake Webb, it was brought to life by acclaimed British producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Foals). The pair's collaboration has infused Methyl Ethel's shoegaze dream-pop palate with electronic and polyrhythmic flourishes, allowing Webb's keening, gender-fluid vocals and searing poetry to take centre stage.

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Colourbox: Music of the band (1982-1987)

24th March 2017

To coincide with Wolfgang Tillmans' first major exhibition at the Tate Modern in London earlier this year, Music of the band (1982-1987), a celebration of Colourbox, is available as a limited double LP.

The 16 tracks chosen by Wolfgang were originally selected to be played on loop at a conceptual playback listening space at Tillmans’ Berlin gallery, Between Bridges, in 2014, where lyrics and samples were pasted on the walls and where copies of the v23-designed records sat alongside original session ½” and ¼” tape reels, seeking to provide a unique environment for the audience to immerse themselves in the band’s modest but potent legacy. A limited number of CDs featuring those exhibition tracks were made available at this 2014 exhibition. Both Colourbox and the Playback Room now form part of Tillmans' exhibition in London

Previously speaking of the band, Wolfgang said, "Brothers Martyn and Steven Young together with Ian Robbins, Lorita Grahame and Debian Curry were pioneers of experimental pop music. They created an eclectic sound drawing from reggae and soul influences, beat-box driven hip-hop rhythms, blue-eyed soul, as well as a fusion of far-ranging influences spanning from classic R&B, to dub and industrial. Using montages of analogue magnetic tape pieces and experimenting with tape machines, Colourbox were at the fore-front of sampling, which in its digital form would become ubiquitous in the course of the 1980's. The band worked in a seeming contrast of pure artistic research in the studio and an anti-intellectual stance towards the outside world."

Between the initial exhibition in Berlin and the Tate, Steven Young has sadly passed away. This release is also being pressed as a tribute to him and to Ian Robbins, who left us in 2014, and the wonderful music they made.

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Future Islands: The Far Field

7th April 2017

"Robust... melodically rich and instantly warm" - The New York Times
"A set of songs that seep, creep, and grow in strength." - NME
"The rare indie rock act that embraces emotionality-in themselves and their audience" - GQ

Across The Far Field's twelve chest-pounding love songs and odes to the road, Future Islands brilliantly expresses the band's central themes they've been exploring for the last decade: that there is power in emotional vulnerability, that one can find a way to laugh and cry in the same breath - and be stronger for it.

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John Moreland: Big Bad Luv

5th May 2017

"He wrings poetry from commonplace words and wisdom from dusty Midwestern country rock, chronicling tangled relationships and dead-end small towns." - Uncut
"Before Big Bad Luv, tears were Moreland's currency - here, he manages to trade the sadness for a sense of purpose, always with a realist's eye." - Rolling Stone Country
"Simply put, Big Bad Luv is one of the best albums of 2017, a testament to living in the moment and letting the details sort themselves out." - PopMatters

John Moreland's fourth album, Big Bad Luv, was recorded in Little Rock, AK, and mostly with a crew of Tulsa friends: John Calvin Abney (piano and guitar), Aaron Boehler (bass), Paddy Ryan (drums), Jared Tyler (dobro) and Lucero's Rick Steff (piano). Coming together in three sessions over ten months, which were sandwiched between touring dates and life, the final album was then mixed by GRAMMY winning Tchad Blake, who has worked with iconic acts from Al Green to Tom Waits.

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Aldous Harding: Party

19th May 2017

"Quiet, cryptic, utterly arresting. - The New York Times
"Haunting" - NPR
"Spellbinding songs. - The Guardian

Party was produced with the award-winning John Parish (PJ Harvey, Sparklehorse) in his hometown of Bristol, taking Harding away from her New Zealand base for an intensive two-week immersion in the studio. As well as a raft of musical contributions from Parish, Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas lends vocals to recent single 'Imagining My Man' and Party closer 'Swell Does The Skull'. It was celebrated as Rough Trade Shops' #1 Album of the Year.

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Pixx: The Age of Anxiety

2nd June 2017

"A riveting and refreshing debut...sweet and soothing electropop joy." - The Guardian
"One of the year's best debuts so far... Brilliant." - The Sunday Times
"A new and unique narrative for the contemporary world." - Loud And Quiet

The Age of Anxiety is the debut album by Pixx. The twelve-song collection, featuring 'I Bow Down', 'Grip', 'Baboo' and 'Waterslides', seeks to address a generation increasingly isolated by an unprecedented new world order, from the pressures of social media to ever-changing political turbulence. The record borrows its title from W.H. Auden's final poem, charting one man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialised world. Published in 1947, Auden's six-part rumination on human isolation in the modern age parallels the overarching themes of Pixx's work some 70 years later.

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Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, James McAlister: Planetarium

9th July 2017

"(Planetarium) manages to balance ambient force fields, 70s sci-fi synths, chiming guitars, sublime string arrangements, Caribou-like shimmer-pulses and (Sufjan) Stevens's penchant for R&B rhythms to majestic and yet weightless effect. Glorious." - The Guardian
"The album merges classical structure with ambient and prog-rock sounds, and with Stevens' voice, a mixture that is both unusual and entirely accessible." - The Sunday Times (Album of the Week)
"A gorgeous, genre-bending ode to the cosmos." - Entertainment Weekly

Planetarium is an album co-composed by four musicians: Bryce Dessner, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, and Sufjan Stevens. Flanked by a string quartet and a consort of seven trombones, this unique collaborative ensemble has assembled an expansive song cycle that explores the Sun, the Moon, the planets and other celestial bodies of our solar system (and beyond) through soundscape, song, science and myth.

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The National: Sleep Well Beast

8th September 2017

"Nuanced, understated, restrained. It's fantastic" - The Guardian
"The National's best LP yet. Haunted by Mordant beauty, rattled paranoia." - Rolling Stone
"Elegant, classy, subtly detailed" - Q

The National's first ever UK #1 album, and highest charting record of their career across the world, Sleep Well Beast is the band's seventh studio album and the follow up to their GRAMMY nominated album Trouble Will Find Me. Sleep Well Beast was produced by member Aaron Dessner with co-production by Bryce Dessner and Matt Berninger. The album was mixed by Peter Katis and recorded at Aaron Dessner's Hudson Valley, New York studio, Long Pond, with additional sessions having taken place in Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles.

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Torres: Three Futures

29th September 2017

"A stunning and important album." - Q
"The dissonant guitars and whirring synths land on the more accessible side of avant-garde rock... though revelling in never quite resolving its melodies" - Uncut
"Truth-bombing songwriter TORRES makes some of the most darkly powerful indie rock around." - Rolling Stone

TORRES is the creative alter-ego of Brooklyn-based Mackenzie Scott. In describing the album, Scott says it "is entirely about using the body that each of us has been given as a mechanism of joy". The 10 original tracks on Three Futures embrace ecstasy, desire and indulgence rather than self-denial, and exude this idea via immersive music. Mechanized grooves are placed at the forefront, providing a framework for perforated electro-pop static, harsh gothic / industrial textures, and insistent Krautrock motifs.

For Three Futures, Scott reconnected with producer Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey), who worked on TORRES' last album Sprinter, to record in Stockport and Dorset, England. David Tolomei (Beach House, Future Islands) mixed the album.

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