Ronnie’s artwork will revealed directly after the show each night and will then ship a few days after.
Random 750 orders will receive a show plectrum with their print (The earlier you order your setlist the greater the chance of getting a show pick.) ‘During rehearsals, I draw up set lists on big canvases, putting down the songs and the keys they’re in. We hang these set lists on the rehearsal room walls so we know where we’ve been and where we’re going.’
Ronnie Wood: ‘I illustrate the band’s set lists, sometimes Keith and Mick add little doodles, and they become works of art in their own right.’ – Ronnie Wood
Over the last two decades, the songs that the Rolling Stones have played in rehearsals, live shows and studio sessions have been recorded by Ronnie Wood in a series of hand-painted set lists. The result is a unique collection of canvases that document sell-out tours across the globe.
After completing her first solo tour since 2014, collaborating with Angel Olsen and Waxahatchee, and then opening for Harry Styles, Madi Diaz is back and stronger than ever. On “Weird Faith”, she explores her growth since her previous album, 2021’s “History of a Feeling“, wherein she wrestled with loneliness and heartache. She presents herself in a new relationship here, and despite this new phase of her life, she doesn’t just write love songs but more broadly focuses on specific thoughts and emotions that arise from being in love.
There’s so much simplicity to her tone, which juxtaposes perfectly with her brilliant aptitude for complex feelings and intricate storytelling. Even leading up to the album, she hooked the audience with early singles (including the Kacey Musgraves collaboration “Don’t Do Me Good”) as she sang about her anxieties and excitements swirling around a new relationship. Just because something feels incredible doesn’t mean it can’t also be scary.
A major standout on “Weird Faith” is “Girlfriend,” a ballad uniquely written to address her new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She captures all the feelings that come up when interacting with your partner’s ex—that awkwardness and insecurity that comes with observing their most attractive qualities as you try to make your love more obvious to show them that your partner has moved on. “Yeah I know I wouldn’t want me to be my ex boyfriend’s new girlfriend,” she sings hauntingly, “So, sorry I’m your ex’s girlfriend.” That last line sums up the whole song: There’s guilt for the uncomfortable situation and there’s empathy for being a former partner—and there’s also a bit of sarcasm to express confidence.
Similarly, on “Get to Know Me” Diaz writes about what it feels like to expose yourself completely to your partner as she considers the fear it brings her to show all of her quirks and insecurities. “How well do you wanna get to know me?” she queries on the track in hopes of figuring out just how emotionally intimate she can be with her partner. In the same way, she sums up all of her anxiety on closer “ObsessiveThoughts,” where she takes you down her mental rabbit hole—all of her questions and insecurities come out, further exemplifying the complexity of her song writing.
“Weird Faith” is a wonderful album that picks up where “History of a Feeling” left off as Madi Diaz’s story continues. It’s not a concept album about breakups, nor is it a narrative about love in a more binary sense, where it’s wholly good or wholly bad. These emotions exist on a spectrum, and Diaz captures the duality of both positive and negative feelings that materialize even when things are at their best.
Her songs have long been about these internal reflections on her life and personal growth—on “Weird Faith”, they just happens to include a love story.
It takes real audacity to open one’s debut album with a 96-second orchestral overture. But on the gauntlet-throwing“Prelude to Ecstasy”, The Last Dinner Party have done just that. It’s a fitting introduction for these witchy-woman Brontë heroines, who in 2023 swash buckled their way onto the UK scene fully formed and festival-ready with their maximalist coquette-core, trailing vintage silks and velvets, pheromones and hormones in their wake.
The Last Dinner Party simply don’t do subtlety. London’s hottest Last Dinner Party has ev-er-y-thing: pomp, circumstance, guitar-goddess energy, Catholic guilt, feral desire, emotional violence, sing-along choruses about mindless [bleep]-ing, mandolins, keytars, liver…”
The Last Dinner Party perform a cover of “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence & The Machine live for BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2024 Hopefully it’s the prelude to a long and iconoclastic career.
Since the end of her long time band Sonic Youth in 2011, Kim Gordon has pursued a path of unpredictability first through the improvisational drones of her experimental guitar outfit Body/Head, and then with the release of her avant-garde pop solo debut “No Home Record” way back in 2019. Yet even given her background as an iconoclast, I still think it’s safe to say none of us expected her to release something like “Bye Bye,” the first single from her sophomore album “The Collective“. A hybrid of noise rock and industrial trap, the track sets squealing guitar against an 808 pattern
Alos here’s her new video for “I’m a Man,” and a track that finds the singer/songwriter/musician/Sonic Youth icon at her most compelling: Previously, Gordon had shared a video for “BYE BYE” to preview the record. Just like “I’m a Man” this clip stars Coco Gordon Moore — Kim’s daughter with her Sonic Youth band mate Thurston Moore — and was directed by Clara Balzary, daughter of Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.
Building on the playful experimentation of her debut, Gordon goes darker and gets weirder while sharpening the song writing, turning out social commentary via menacing din on “I’m a Man,” industrial shoegaze on “Tree House,” and dangerous levels of bass on “The Believers.” Yet through the squalls and squeals, pulses and throbs, Gordon’s effortlessly oblique beat poetry remains at the centre, the adhesive keeping together the album’s myriad chaotic moments while branding it as a work wholly her own.
The new album follows Kim Gordon’s 2019 solo debut, “No Home Record”.
Kim Gordon released “The Collective”, her second solo album, on March 8th via Matador Records.
An essential new addition to Chicago’s long lineage of forward-thinking indie rock, Friko transform every song into a moment of collective catharsis. On their full-length debut and first release for ATO Records, vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger merge elements of post-punk and chamber-pop and experimental rock, magnifying their music’s exhilarating power with a steady barrage of spirited ensemble vocals. Poetic, explosive, and sublimely raw in feeling, “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here brings an equally visceral intensity to brutally heavy anthems and heart-on-sleeve ballads alike, creating an immediate outlet for the most unwieldy emotions.
Produced by Scott Tallarida and Friko with additional production from Jack Henry, “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here” embodies a sonic complexity befitting of a band that names Romantic-era classical music and the more primal edges of art-rock among their inspirations. As Kapetan reveals, the frenzied and majestic opening track “Where We’ve Been” set the tone for the pure abandon embraced by Friko throughout the album’s creation (a process that also included former bassist and founding member Luke Stamos). “We’d tried recording a different version of that song and it didn’t feel right,” Kapetan recalls. “We went back in and reworked it and came up with something that was very much a group effort and doesn’t follow a pop structure at all, and it felt incredible—we were all sobbing afterward. It was something I’d never really felt before in music.”
Mastered by Heba Kadry (Björk, Big Thief) and engineered by Henry and Tallarida, “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here” sustains that combustible energy on “Crimson To Chrome”: a downhearted yet exultant track “I’d been working in the same warehouse for years and nothing was really happening with the band, and I started questioning the whole point,” Kapetan says of the song’s origins. “Even though there was so much purpose and love in it, I was also feeling a lot of angst.” On the wildly sprawling “Crashing Through,” Friko delve deeper into the album-wide theme that Kapetan encapsulates as “wanting better for yourself and the people around you, but wondering how can you possibly do that with the world we live in,” channelling both despair and glory in the song’s choir-like vocals. “It wasn’t intentional for us to have group vocals all over this record,” Kapetan points out, noting that Tallarida, Henry, and several close friends joined the band in singing backup. “It just happened naturally because we all kept singing along.”
Mainly recorded live at Tallarida’s studio Trigger Chicago, “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here” achieves a dreamlike grandeur on “For Ella,” a love song sketched by Kapetan after visiting a graveyard in Wisconsin. In bringing the piano-laced reverie to life, Friko worked with violinist Macie Stewart and cellist Alejandro Quiles, elevating the track into a quietly symphonic epic touched with a lovely melancholy (from the opening lines: “You were running through the backyard/Said the puddles were the ocean/Now the smell of rainy days always remind me of you”). Another song illuminating the immense depth of their musicality, “Get Numb To It!” emerges as a full-tilt, pogo-ready anthem etched with so many unexpected details. “When we recorded that song Niko and I were each on pianos on opposite sides of the room, just slamming on them for texture,” says Minzenberger. “There’s moments all over the record where we were both improvising at the same time, but they’re mostly used in a very subtle way, without making it the main focal point.”
At the heart of “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here” is the powerful emotional connection Friko’s members have cultivated since childhood. As kids growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kapetan and Stamos became friends in kindergarten and eventually crossed paths with Minzenberger in high school. Raised in a musical family—their dad is a jazz/classical guitarist, their older sister is a singer—Minzenberger began playing drums at age 10 and later took up guitar, bass, and piano. “I remember going on a camping trip with my family in elementary school and listening to some song on the radio and having it hit me in a way where everything else faded out and all I could hear was the drums,” they say. “It was this moment of realizing, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’” Noting that “music was always going to be my only option,” Kapetan also got his start as a drummer and, like Minzenberger, played in bands all throughout high school. “My dad loved music and played guitar when he was younger but ended up getting into the restaurant business,” he says. “He owned a few homestyle diners and when I was growing up a lot of musicians would come in and I’d get to talk to them, which definitely had an effect on me.”
Formed in 2019, Friko soon began taking the stage at legendary Chicago venues like the Empty Bottle and Schubas Tavern, self-releasing their acclaimed debut EP “Whenever Forever” in 2022 and making their festival debut at Bonnaroo the following spring. Over the years, Kapetan and Minzenberger have found a formidable bond in their shared love for classical composers like Frédéric Chopin, an element that indelibly informs the expansive emotionality of Friko’s music. “Chopin is one of my favourite composers, and the feeling I get from listening to his nocturnes is the same sort of deep, loving sorrow that I get from playing music with Niko,” says Minzenberger. “I wish I could understand why listening to solo piano music and playing really heavy rock songs can create the same very palpable feeling—but at the same time, I don’t want to understand it.”
A DIY endeavor completed before their signing to ATO, the making of “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here” involved enlisting the talents of friends like Eli Schmitt (creator of the album artwork), video director Alice Avery, and tour manager Stas Slyvka. “So much of this record happened because of friends helping us out, like Scott letting us use his studio,” says Kapetan. “It’s also an event space, so there’d be times when Scott, Jack, and I would be working on mixing the record with a town-hall meeting going on in the next room.” In every step of the process, that self-reliance allowed for an unfettered freedom that often led to moments of transcendence. To that end, Minzenberger recounts experiencing a profound sense of elation in the performance of a gloriously breakneck track called “Chemical.” “It feels like I’m about to fall off my chair every time we play it, because it’s so fast and involved and the urgency of the guitar part fires me up in such a specific way,” they say. “It’s like being a kid and riding your bike really fast—this childlike adrenaline where you’re very much in your body.”
Known for their high-energy live show, Friko aim to deliver a live experience that’s fantastically disorienting in its emotional arc. “We’ll try and play one of the really loud songs and go to a slow song right after that, so that it’s super-emotional and dramatic but also just a loose, good time,” says Kapetan. “I’ve had people tell me they had so much fun and danced a lot at our shows but then also cried, which hopefully means we’re giving them the full spectrum,” Minzenberger adds. And with the release of “Where we’ve been, Where we go from here”, Friko hope that their music’s emotional potency might have a galvanizing impact on the audience. “One of the main things we want to do as a band is talk about what’s happening right now and everything we’re feeling, with an honesty and directness that gets through to people,” says Kapetan. “I hope that our music helps everyone feel more deeply, but in a way that goes beyond just reacting to the song. I want it to pick people up, so that they can actually go out and do something with whatever they’re feeling.”
It’s rare for a young band to have a clear vision for their debut album, but UK alt-rockers English Teacher beat the odds with style and audacity. “This Could Be Texas”slaloms cleverly from genre to genre as vocalist Lily Fontaine pontificates insecurities, inequality, and general British government incompetence. The group successfully melds post-punk to other genres that subvert classic assumptions about them, innovating within the lane of post-post-punk. The group’s big breakthrough came by way of their 2021 viral hit “R&B,” which was snuck into and reimagined for “This Could Be Texas”.
English Teacher released a single, ‘R&B’. The new recording is from their debut album, ‘This Could Be Texas’.Lily Fontaine (vocals, rhythm guitar, synth) says: “When I was with him I had writer’s block and to add insult to irony, the only idea I had was for an R&B top line – the genre people always assumed I worked in. As soon as he ended it, I converted that top line into the lyrics and riff for ‘R&B’, and took it to my three best mates. Putting the effort that you could potentially put into a partner, back into yourself and your career, is cool and sexy and gets you signed to Island Records and writing press quotes in a tour van in Holland and you get to meet Jools Holland. Thanks lad.”
Of the video, they add: “This is an ode to 2021’s original ‘R&B’ video and to Douglas snogging himself. It’s an ode to self-love and an ode to not putting up with bullshit. It’s an ode to the chaos of the calm and the calm of the chaos. It’s an ode to the greatest TV show of all time – The Shivering Truth. Here’s to theatre and here’s to behind the scenes. We fight. We break up. We kiss. We make up. Once again directed by the incredibly talented Sarah Oglesby (Sodium Films), we hope you enjoy.”
Fontaine’s languid vocal style, though, is totally relaxed and shines most when it becomes energetic and sardonic—as heard on “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space,” with her cool, inconspicuous jab at Elon Musk. Still, English Teacher’s genre identity is multitudinous and can hardly be compared to one band. The title track traverses spoken word and prog rock while “Mastermind Specialism” meddles in acoustic folk.
Cloud Nothings achieved an early, major artistic breakthrough at the beginning of 2012 with their sophomore record “Attack on Memory“, an explosive collection of post-hardcore that seemed to hit reset on a still-young act previously peddling in power-pop. Recorded with Steve Albini, the album felt attuned to the veteran engineer’s long list of credits, with searing guitars and punchy snares that recalled the likes of some of his prior recordings with Superchunk, Jawbreaker, and Pixies. More importantly, it revealed Cloud Nothings as a proper band rather than as the solo project of Dylan Baldi, creating music that reflects the instrumental chemistry between the group’s players as much as it does the songwriting of their leader.
More than a decade has passed since that album’s release, but it proved auspicious for the next 12 years of progression for Cloud Nothings. Each of the half-dozen albums they’ve released since has built on that abrasive and austere template, sometimes in the form of brighter pop songs, as on 2017’s “Life Without Sound“, or via heavier noise-rock pummel on 2018’s “Last Burning Building“. With each permutation they approached that magnetic intensity from a different angle, but that taut, muscular core remained consistently intact. And it remains an essential anchor on the soaring anthems of the group’s eighth album, “Final Summer”.
All the necessary building blocks of a Cloud Nothings record are still present on “Final Summer“: driving rhythms, distorted guitars, anthemic choruses, song lengths (mostly) under four minutes apiece. But even as the aesthetic of the band largely remains rooted in the urgency of influences like Wipers and Hüsker Dü, their song writing has grown more sophisticated and nuanced over time, even occasionally incorporating elements that you might not have expected from prior Cloud Nothings records. The opening title track is one such example, featuring an impressively big production built on krautrock-like rhythmic repetitions and burbling synthesizer backdrop, as Baldi starts off the record with a bright message of hope: “Put your hand in my hand / Give it to another / Keep away the bad things / Fill yourself with color.”
That optimism colours much of “Final Summer“, replacing some of the angst and volatility of earlier Cloud Nothings songs with a measured positivity. On the tuneful, earnest “Running Through the Campus,” Baldi declares, “I never run for anyone else / It’s just a thing I do for myself,” while in the slower, hazier “On the Chain,” he asks, “Do you dream about the world you know? / Do you want to change a thing at all?” And on the final song “Common Mistake,” Baldi offers a simple reassurance: “You’ll be alright, just give more than you take.”
The sentiments are warmer, perhaps, but Cloud Nothings haven’t softened. The band’s energy level never slackens throughout “Final Summer”, and the entirety of the record’s half-hour run time sounds massive, even at its most deceptively simple. But in moments like “I’d Get Along,” a towering anthem in which Baldi wrings every last ounce of power from only two lines, Cloud Nothings reveal how much artistic growth they’ve undergone.
The Asheville musician is back with the lead single from his next album, ‘Manning Fireworks,’ out in September his next album, “Manning Fireworks” will be out September 6th via Anti-Records, with a new song, “She’s Leaving You.” The track finds Lenderman flexing his characteristically clever and candid songwriting skills, delivering a sardonic assessment of a cheating husband’s grim midlife crisis that still maintains some poignancy: “Go rent a Ferrari/And sing the blues,” he sings at one point. “Believe that Clapton was the second coming.” Lenderman plays pretty much every instrument on the track, while his Wednesday bandmate, Karly Hartzman, sings backup, and producer Alex Farrar plays piano.
Lenderman and his band, the Wind, perform the track at a talent show, but their lackluster performance does little to win over the crowd, who are (understandably) more enthralled by the juggler, magician, cheerleaders, speed eater, interpretive dancer, and the guy who jumps over mop buckets and slippery-when-wet signs.
“Manning Fireworks” marks Lenderman’s fourth studio album and first for Anti-. It follows his 2022 breakthrough “Boat Songs“, as well as his 2023 live album “And the Wind (Live and Loose!)“.
“Mogg’s Motel” is the debut solo album from Phil Mogg, the legendary vocalist and founding member of rock icons UFO. Following the band’s final show in 2022 and breakup announcement, Phil thankfully didn’t take retirement to heart and fans will be delighted to know that this excellent new album rocks in the same vein as his previous band. As a dedicated fan of UFO and a long-time admirer of the extraordinary talents of vocalist Phil Mogg, I couldn’t be more thrilled about his latest musical endeavor, “Moggs Motel.” After years of creating videos and reviews celebrating UFO’s music, it’s exciting to witness Phil Mogg’s return with a new band and a fresh album.
For those who have been concerned about Phil Mogg’s absence from the rock scene following the end of UFO and his subsequent health issues, worry no more. Phil Mogg, one of the most influential rock vocalists worldwide, has made a stunning comeback with his latest release, “Moggs Motel.” This album marks a new chapter in his illustrious career, showcasing his enduring artistic charisma, uniquely expressive voice, and boundless creativity.
“Moggs Motel” was crafted with the collaboration of Tony Newton (bass & keyboards) from Voodoo Six, a band that had previously toured with UFO, and Neil Carter (guitar, keyboards, vocals), a long-standing associate having been with Phil in UFO for many years. The album was recorded at Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris’s studio in Essex, UK. To complete the line-up, Joe Lazarus (drums) and Tommy Gentry (guitar) joined in the studio sessions.
The Fat Angel Sings 