The Fat Angel Sings

Filled with fiery politics at its forefront, and opening track ‘Bad Apple’ dives in at the deep end. Initiating the listener with blaring sirens and distorted bass, before splintering into a raging breakbeat as vocalist Phoebe Lunny proceeds to tear down the British police force, ensuring that no issue or problem with the institution is left undiscussed. To accompany the scathing lyricism that Lunny lays down throughout the album, the instrumentals of each track can be equally as ferocious. It certainly seems as though bassist Lilly Macieira has grown increasingly more confident, with a willingness to explore a breadth of styles that helps to diversify each track from the others.

The anger on display in the opener doesn’t dissipate soon either, ‘Company Culture’ discusses the gross actions of men in professional environments, while ‘Big Dick Energy’ tackles men that pose as caring about women’s issues, but as a ruse to try and make themselves more attractive.. While the album on its surface is so outwardly aggressive, there are layers of introspection that show a new level of depth to the duo’s writing, from the battle to express queerness in such a volatile, queerphobic society on ‘No Homo’, the narration of a battle with an eating disorder on ‘Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels’, or the experiences of trying to fit in with an undiagnosed condition on “Special, Different.’ Who Let The Dogs Out” is a serious punk album that does well to remain witty and smart even when faced with the world’s biggest issues. It should and hopefully will put the duo right at the forefront of modern punk trailblazers.

Lambrini Girls are a buzzy Brighton punk duo leading the fight for change

The world is on fire, and on their debut album, the Brighton punk-heroes respond by bringing an Exocet missile to a gunfight. Ferocious and funny, their endlessly quotable lyrics skewer police brutality, misogyny and nepo babies over exhilarating barbed-wire riffs, while the riotous party-starting electroclash of ‘Cuntology 101’ provides an empowering (and joyously sweary) manifesto. 

With in-your-face and bombastic by design, you can expect Lambrini Girls‘ Phoebe Lunny to spend most of the gig in the crowd. Their loose, jagged brand of punk continues to call out the abuse, transphobia and misogyny that’s plagued their local scene and beyond for far too long. Their fight for safer, inclusive spaces is one worth rallying behind.

It would be natural to view “Perverts”, the daring follow-up to Ethel Cain’s 2022 breakout “Preacher’s Daughter“, as a response to, and rejection of, everything about success that might register as noise, not least because it was accompanied by a Tumblr post entitled ‘The Consequence of Audience’. Preacher’s Daughter” amassed a fervent following, and “Perverts” no doubt poses a challenge to the segment of Cain’s audience that has trouble engaging with the artist’s persona in the absence of unambiguous lore and soaring melodies. Yet the 90-minute project – released at the start of the year but hardly overshadowed by the proper album that succeeded it – doesn’t feel like a departure so much as an opportunity for Hayden Anhedönia to home in on the esoteric darkness she holds a deep reverence for, the eerie dissonance and muffled silences that were seen tangential rather than core to her song writing. 

Though its nine tracks are almost 90 minutes long, “Perverts” isn’t an actual album, according to its creator. Rather, this drone-inspired record that scared, confused, and put off a lot of Ethel Cain’s fans upon its release in January is an experimental sideshow that has nothing to do with her 2022 debut, “Preacher’s Daughter”, nor the two forthcoming records that will complete that narrative trilogy. Except, of course, for the fact that Cain is behind it. The project is a starkly haunting, harrowing, and challenging piece of music that transports the listener into a wholly unrecognizable world from that of “Preacher’s Daughter” (as well as from the singles we’ve heard so far from next month’s “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You” LP). Especially early on during the eerie, old-timey introduction of the opening title track and the periods of near-but-not-quite silence that follow over the song’s 12 minute run-time, it feels like you’re in the pitch black of a horror film or video game, such is the visceral sense of dread and unease that underlines this record. Yet there are (very necessary) moments of sublime and poignant beauty, too. It all makes for a demanding but immensely rewarding listen that marks Cain out as a truly incredible, iconoclastic talent.

 If her new year’s resolution was to up her game in terms of productivity then Hayden Anhedonia, known professionally as Flordia’s Ethel Cain, has certainly achieved that. At the time of writing, we’ve not even reached summer solstice 2025, and we’re gearing up for her second record this year, following on from the ambient/noise/drone release, “Perverts“. This latest album is, however, a bigger deal in Ethel Cain folklore as it’s billed as a prequel to the record that made her a household name in indie: “Preacher’s Daughter“. If you’re into rare merch, this copy has something worth framing on your wall included with it in the shape of a limited edition art print. And given the stature of the album to come, it’ll be merch worth hanging onto. Of the highlights on the tracklist, ‘Nettles’ is stunning, with the instrumentals an aural hug: comforting yet tear jerking and her voice knockout Americana of the highest order.

Jane Remover’s “Revengeseekerz” has been cemented as one of the best albums of the year, with the artist’s Venturing record “Ghostholding” earning at least an honourable mention. But they couldn’t help but close out the year by unleashing the project with such pop potential that they were hesitant to flesh it out into a full-length. Still, “♡” (pronounced , per the artist) arrived to the delight of fans holding Jane Remover’s 2024 singles in high regard, giving them a home by slightly working them and adding two new songs to the mix. “I build a home from every vision,” they sing on the fantastic ‘Magic I Want U’, meaning they’re free to tweak and explode it at any moment. But more than anything, “♡” benefits from the blissful marriage of these songs, which are high on infatuation and playful irreverence: frying laughter and fireworks, pasting blink-and-you;ll-miss-it samples, splicing a reggae-ton beat to a shoegaze song for the hell of it.

Even reduced to an EP, it boasts hooks for days. “Said, ‘I wanna make it to Christmas’/ But I fall off the bone,” Jane sings of a relationship on ‘Dream Sequence’. At least when it comes to her music, emotional preservation appears effortless.

Grumpy from Queens district of New York make sure we remember their unnerving idiosyncrasies first. Their new EP “Piebald”, which doubles down on the contradictions of last year’s “Wolfed“, is bookended by its most eerie, glitchy songs, affirming the grotesque aesthetic of the band’s visuals. Released at the end of 2024, “Wolfed” earned Grumpy coverage in Stereogum, Paste, and the New York Times. The band crashed into 2025 with a series of collaborative singles, including “Lonesome Ride” with Sidney Gish and Precious Human, and “Harmony” with Claire Rousay and Pink Must.

“Piebald” follows these playful experiments with even more delectable grotesqueries. “It’s honesty in drag,” Schmitt says of the music: not covered up but accentuated, exaggerated, liberated, stalking the stage in chiffon and top hat.

Make no mistake, though: these songs are about love, though the kind that’s warped in unconventional, often uncomfortable shapes. Sandwiched between them, though, are tracks like the infectious and uncomplicated ‘Crush’, which delights at the thought of complete lack of supervision, and ‘Proud of You’, which soars like a surefire hit.

Grumpy’s EP “Piebald” is a lopsided grin with a knife behind it — a shimmery gut punch that turns the grotesque into glamour and heartbreak into theater. Anchored by a voice that wavers between charming villain and sad clown, “Piebald” invites the listener into a world where ugliness isn’t just embraced — it’s the source of Grumpy’s power.

But it still doesn’t get better than Grumpy at their absolute rawest, a vulnerability rooted in their dynamic as a band: Like a darker spin on a Katy Kirby song, ‘Knot’ finds Heaven Schmitt singing “Holding you last night was worse than holding no one” as if inside the belly of a beast. That’s where the horror spawns.

released September 26th, 2025

Written by Heaven Schmitt

It’s hard to believe that Moin’s debut LP Moot!, given the band’s evolution over the past four years, now almost seems like a conventional post-rock record. Three albums in and the London trio continues disassembling its rhythm-focused experiments, leaning further into jazz and mutating their approach as they bring in new collaborators. Or rather, on the gripping “Belly Up” EP, bring past collaborators deeper into their world: Qatari-American writer Sophia Al-Maria, who contributed to their previous album “You Never End“, appears on ‘See’, a killer of an opening track that also features the frantic saxophone of Ben Vince.

Moin is made of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead (Raime / Blackest Ever Black) as well as long time collaborator and percussionist visionary Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga / Vanishing Twin).

“To obliterate the edge of my understanding in the way that things oughta be,” as Al-Maria puts it, seems to encapsulate Moin’s M.O.: interweaving the furious with the languid, the way impending doom masquerades as routine. Even when they create a mood of obvious disorientation on ‘I Don’t Know Where to Look’, they’re quick to supplant it with another one. Look at it a few years from now, they seem to suggest, and it’ll sound completely different.

Going belly up, guess it’s always a possibility.

released May 9th, 2025

For now, Florence Road wear their influences on their sleeves, but few rising acts did so as proudly and confidently as the Irish quartet on their debut release, “Fall Back”. The EP opens with their poppiest song, ‘Break the Girl’, which is straight out of the Olivia Rodrigo playbook – and the band opened for Rodrigo this year. Rodrigo’s producer, Dan Nigro, is one of a few big-ticket producers who contributed to the EP, co-producing the wistfully lush ‘Caterpillar’. That one remind you of Phoebe Bridgers? That’s her collaborator Marshall Vore in the credits of the theatrical closer ‘Heavy’.

But none of those facts are as remarkable as Florence Road’s fine-tuned emotionality, which makes them sound like they’ve been doing it for as long as any of their inspirations. But at their most spiteful, on the breakup anthem ‘Goodnight’, Lily Aron lets the goofiness slip, and you hope this kind of youthful charm never eludes them.

We are devoted Wishy fans—and rightfully so. One of our favourite Indiana band has had a momentous 2-year run: releasing two EPs in 2023, “Mana” and “Paradise“, and following it up last year with their debut album “Triple Seven”, a record that found spots on both our best albums and best debut albums lists for 2024. On top of that, the band was featured as part of our Best of What’s New last August. All of this is to say: if you’re new around here, go give Wishy a listen. They’ve already shared their third EP, “Planet Popstar“—a buoyant fever dream of indie-pop nostalgia plucked straight out of the aughts. The guitars on “Over and Over” are an instant earworm, anchored throughout the track by Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ near weightless vocals.

Meanwhile, the snare heavy rhythms and steady, flowing groove brings to mind (or my mind, at least) the effortless cool of early Yo La Tengo. Since “Mana”, Wishy have matured at an amazing rate. They’re still pulling on the same threads of longing and self-reflection and gazing down at the same guitar pedals, but the music is different—arriving both more refined and intentional in every foggy lyric and fuzzy riff.

“Planet Popstar” Though these six songs are technically B-sides that didn’t make Wishy’s debut LP “Triple Seven”, a couple more and they’d have a compelling full-length follow-up in their hands. Yet this is a band that excels at and experiments with the EP format, as evidenced by 2023’s “Paradise“, which made our list that year and was compiled with the new one as “Paradise on Planet Popstar” on sky blue vinyl. As the title suggests, Wishy are on top of the world here – or maybe somewhere on the outskirts of it. Spellbound and starry-eyed, the record approaches euphoria with the shakiness of living in the real world, soaring and shimmering but willing to undercut its own sweetness. It’s elevated, most of all, by Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter’s dynamic interplay, which often frames the songs in conversation with each other. “Book a flight to the sun/ ‘Cause I’d rather be burned alive/ If I thought it would catch your eye,” Krauter sings on the title track, while Pitchkites laments, on the bubbly ‘Chaser’, “I’m just another one of your trips around the sun.” For the listener, at least, the ride’s worthwhile.

released April 25th, 2025

We lost a lot of bands in 2025, but none offered a means to grieve as cathartic as Porridge Radio. If one word could summarize the band’s music, “catharsis” would be the one – but “The Machine Starts to Sing”, an EP comprising songs recorded during the sessions for last year’s “Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me“, is more subdued in its delivery.

When Dana Margolin started working on the fourth Porridge Radio album, there was something different in how the songwriter approached creativity.

“Almost all the songs started out as poems,” says Margolin of the work that became “Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me” (2024), “I wanted to challenge myself.” In songwriting, Dana argues, she had learnt that the writer can always hide behind the tricks of the music and well-worn techniques such as repetition. “In a poem, though,” says Dana, “you can’t hide.”

Recorded in the Somerset countryside in early 2024 by long time Big Thief and Laura Marling engineer Dom Monks, The UK band’s new album is a coming-of-age moment inspired by burnout, the music industry, heartbreak and the brutal collapse of significant relationships and – crucially – Dana’s own increasing immersion in her craft as an artist.

Apart from the six-minute opening title track, the rest of the songs tend to downplay their climactic build ups by relying mostly on acoustic instrumentation. Even the closer ‘I’ve Got a Feeling (Stay Lucky)’, which swells with organic intensity, avoids blown-out distortion. “No need to talk about/ No need to cry about it/ Like dust, it all just blows away,” Dana Margolin sings on ‘Don’t Want to Dance’. Porridge Radio, of course, are the gale-force wind – and the best we can do is keep listening.

“Dancing Shoes” showcases Nilüfer Yanya’s acrobatic instrumental skills and her pull towards exploratory music. While other artists abide by sticky hooks and addictive choruses, Yanya’s appeal lies in her ability to let her songs develop—making each track feel alive as it unfolds and is satisfyingly balanced. “Dancing Shoes” has its fair share of scratchy, industrial embellishments, but Yanya puts herself at the core, so each song has a soft heart and spiky exterior. While the industrial drumming overpowers the songs’ stripped-back core at times, and some shaky synth embellishments lack the confidence to justify their presence, the songs on “Dancing Shoes” are a surprising and lush collection. Each of the four chapters bleeds into new genres and transforms along the way. That’s the beauty of giving your darlings some sitting time: you’re giving them the space to breathe.

Nilüfer Yanya releases her new EP “Dancing Shoes” on Ninja Tune out now.

“Dancing Shoes” was written alongside a collection of tracks that Nilüfer re-approached with her creative partner Wilma Archer when she returned from touring her latest record. The project includes Nilüfer’s latest singles “Where To Look” and “Cold Heart”.

released July 2nd, 2025

“Chrysalis” by she’s green make the kind of shoegaze that tends to melt into the atmosphere, not quite as noisy or hooky as their recent tourmates in Glixen and Softcult. But on their latest EP “Chrysalis”, they prove there’s real muscle and heart to their Slowdive-coded aesthetic. Zofia Smith’s iridescent voice reaches too many high notes to fade into the background, giving weight to familiar tropes in the genre: ghosts taking on the shape of distorted guitars (‘Graze’), love as a delicate daydream (‘Silhouette’).

she’s green has put me into a transe. The power and ethereal are so complimentary, each song feels like being raptured into an eternal state of bliss. The visceral drumming and pummelling during some of the softer moments suggest it’s often the beautiful dreams that land a punch to the gut. Rather than shrouding them in layers of gauze, she’s green remind us they can’t be buried for too long. 

released August 15th, 2025