The Fat Angel Sings

“She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She” is Chelsea Wolfe’s first solo album since her excellent 2019 LP “Birth of Violence”, and it’s at once a return to form and a venture towards something entirely new. The album’s title reflects its central theme: a conversation between past, present, and future selves, exploring rebirth and personal transformation. 

Chelsea Wolfe has been a scene staple of all forms of gothic music for nearly two decades now, but her latest head-turn of an album “She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She” is as serpentine as its mantra-like title. Coming off her work with composer Tyler Bates for the original score to the 2022 Ti West slasher X and a collaborative LP with metalcore legends Converge, Wolfe continues to evolve from her early neo-folk days in the mid-2000s into heavier industrial and darkwave sounds after 2015’s “Abyss“, 2017’s “Hiss Spun“, and 2019’s “Birth of Violence“. As her recent music started to climb into the Billboard charts for the first time in her career, Wolfe kept the alluring and suffocating atmosphere as taut as the thrilling horror films she’s come to score.

The allure of “She Reaches Out” is in how it captures our liminal moments where we wrestle with self-reflection and self-evolution after pivotal life events. Wolfe depicts all 10 dark tales with a shapeshifting beauty and menace. Opener “Whispers in the Echo Chamber” starts with lyrics about rebuilding yourself through pain as Wolfe’s vocals rotate in a vortex created by producer Dave Sitek’s modular wall: “Bathing in the blood of who I used to be,” she sings.

The shadowplay continues with “The Liminal” and “Eyes Like Nightshade,” the latter paying tribute to Wolfe’s favourite scene from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire in which two lovers try hallucinogenic flying ointment and end up with belladonna eyes. Likewise, Wolfe’s eyes continue dilating as she reaches out further into the world of moonlit music.

The Cure have announced a new live album, their seventh. “Songs Of A Live World Troxy London MMXXlV” was recorded at the band’s show last month at the 3100-capacity Troxy in East London, an event scheduled to celebrate their new album release “Songs Of A Lost World”, The record is the rock outfit’s first album in 16 years, and it’s been heavily anticipated for years now. And with the success of the new record, and features live versions of the album’s eight songs.  The somewhat private concert celebrated the release of the highly-anticipated album “Songs Of A Lost World“. The performance included live versions of songs like “Alone”, “And Nothing Is Forever”, “I Can Never Say Goodbye”, and more.

The Troxy London set went much longer than what will be available on “Songs Of A Live World“. Eight songs from the set will make it to the live album. However, the performance itself spanned a whopping 31 songs. The set featured the entirety of “Songs Of A Lost World” performed live. The band also performed a few well-known Cure hits and fan-favourite songs.

The album will be released on December 13th, and The Cure’s royalties will be donated to War Child, the charity that works to support children living with the effects of war and conflict. It’ll be released across a number of different formats, including standalone single CD, LP and cassette. It’ll also be packaged as a double set with the studio album, wrapped in a variation of the original album artwork. The vinyl versions of both albums will ship in February 2025.

At the same time, the band have launched single and double “blood red moon” vinyl editions of “Songs Of A Lost World”. The double set features a second disc featuring instrumental versions of the studio tracks.

The Cure’s royalties from sales of “Songs Of A Live World Troxy London MMXXlV” will be donated to War Child

Fontaines D.C. released their highly-anticipated fourth album, “Romance”. “Romance” is the band’s first album with producer James Ford and is without doubt their most assured, inventive and sonically adventurous record yet. It’s set to build on the success of the Dublin-made, now London-based band’s acclaimed 2022 album “Skinty Fia”, which reached number 1 in the UK and Irish album charts…

The Dublin quintet’s fourth LP is an essay of mosh-pit guitars careening into baggy desires and stringed visions of mercy. “Romance” opens with a feeling of limitless possibility framed against a backdrop of impending doom. The ominous title track feels like a death march: Its piano melody teeters between innocence and occult, accompanied by brooding fuzz guitar and percussion that sounds like it was recorded in a damp cave.

The band switched producers from Dan Carey (Black Midi and Squid) to James Ford (Arctic Monkeys and Gorillaz), and it feels like they have shifted up a gear both musically and in ambition terms. The raw, savage songs from their first two records, ‘Dogrel’ and ‘A Hero’s Death,’ have morphed into bigger, fuller songs on ‘Romance’.

Strings, synths, and beautiful backing vocals are present, but there is also a nod to the nu-metal bands they were listening to as adolescents, most noticeably in their wardrobe makeover and in the delivery of some of the songs on the record, including the first single, ‘Starburster’.

There is a sprinkling of shoegaze on tracks like ‘Desire’ and ’Sundowner’, a touch of grunge on ‘Death Kink’, a slice of soft rock on ‘Motorcycle Boy’ and a bone fide string-laden ballad in ‘Horseness Is the Whatness’ (a quote from ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce fact fans).

You don’t expect an album called “Romance” to open with a stalking titled track brimming with gothic vibrations and the line, “Into the darkness again.” Yet, that’s what Fontaines D.C. does so brilliantly throughout their fourth full-length in five years: subverting your every expectation, from theme to sound to the very definition of “romance.”

The Irish band uses the collection to paint a beautiful dystopia where the heart and the head battle against destruction. Epic strings and lush production from James Ford place frontman Grian Chatten’s lyrics within the cinematic heritage of everything from Akira to Wings of Desire, immediate influences on the band’s feelings-first approach to songwriting.

Tracks like ‘In The Modern World’ are as good as anything they have released and about as far from their early sound as they have been. This isn’t a criticism; it is fantastic hearing a group I love evolve and develop; it is like discovering another brilliant band – although singer Brian Chatten’s voice is so distinctive that I’m always reminded of who I’m listening to.

I reckon this is the most accessible album they have ever realised; by that, I mean it isn’t as thrashy, dark or angular as their previous releases. By accident or design, this is probably the most radio-friendly record of their career. It should see an army of new fans discover them, which will propel them into the stadium-filling bracket – they did say they would be big.

Fontaines D.C. don’t claim the label post-punk, and “Romance” defies you to challenge them. They are rock artists in the truest sense, captivating with the colours and emotions of their compositions as much as the sounds themselves. Pulling this off with a record that explores such darkness without leaving you feeling desolate is, at its core, profoundly romantic.

Waxahatchee (aka Katie Crutchfield) is releasing a new album, “Tigers Blood”, on March 22nd via ANTI-. This week she shared its third single, “365,” via a music video filmed in one continuous shot. Corbett Jones and Nick Simonite directed the video.

Crutchfield had this to say about “365” in a press release: “‘365’ is a song about co-dependency as it pertains to addiction and relationships with addicts. It’s something I’ve dealt with a lot in my life and I really wanted to distill the nerves and emotions down to their purest form in this song.

Brad Cook and I had a lot of ideas we tried for this one, but in the end, we tracked it live just him, Jake Lenderman, and myself running the song a couple of times together in the room.”

We’ve never questioned the songwriting talents of Katie Crutchfield — only a fool would. And yet, even when it seems impossible to do so, the artist continues to outdo herself. The immaculate “Tigers Blood” picks up where 2020’s “Saint Cloud” left off, with Crutchfield embracing her rootsiest, alt-countryiest of tendencies, this time with the help of rising indie star MJ Lenderman. The resulting 12 numbers boast effortless, near-flawless construction, over top of which Crutchfield delivers her abstracted, beautifully contradictory, poignant tales.

There are highs and lows, moments of boredom and burnout, and a perpetual, perhaps unspoken plea to keep moving forward. Ultimately, it’s a project that proves Crutchfield is still growing, both personally and artistically, and we’re just glad she’s invited us along for the ride.

“No Name” was almost the biggest surprise drop of 2024 (thanks, K.Dot), and Jack White’s newest collection of songs still made a huge impression. Describing his new album as “guitar-forward” feels like an understatement, as Johnny Guitar (his new persona, per Instagram) jams through these 13 tracks with something to prove about himself as an artist, as well as the power of good rock and roll.

Jack White’s back in a big, big way! Here he slides back into the raw, blown out garage rock that he’s so well known for and man does it sound good. The riffs are piled high all over this album and he’s never sounded so urgent and utterly relevant. Everything distorts in just the right places and the hooks are guaranteed to stay in your head for a long, long time. He’s stripped everything back and come back bigger, badder and better than ever. 2024 needs this man big time.

“That’s How I’m Feeling” delivers hardest in terms of rock vibes, but there’s something spiritually compelling about the very next track, “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking),” which faces down civilization’s decline with wit and positive thinking: Whatever the future might hold, unlike the rats we’re not “food for cats” — for right now, at least.

“Funeral For Justice” is the new album by Mdou Moctar. Recorded at the close of two years spent touring the globe following the release of 2019 breakout “Afrique Victime“, it captures the Nigerian quartet in ferocious form. The music is louder, faster, and more wild. The guitar solos are feedback-scorched and the lyrics are passionately political. Nothing is held back or toned down. The songs on “Funeral For Justice” speak unflinchingly to the plight of Niger and of the Tuareg people.

“This album is really different for me,” explains Moctar, the band’s singer, namesake, and indisputably iconic guitarist. “Now the problems of terrorist violence are more serious in Africa. When the U.S. and Europe came here, they said they’re going to help us, but what we see is really different. They never help us to find a solution.”

Mdou Moctar’s latest effort delivers the band’s most raw and politically charged work to date. The record took form amid Niger’s looming civil war and heightened political instability within the nation. The Tuareg guitarist and his band waste no time in addressing the violence and colonialism that have destabilized his people: “The world rises and falls, meanwhile my people’s fate remains uncertain,” asserts Moctar on “Oh France,” a poignant anti-colonial anthem. 

Having experimented with everything from IDM to glitch-core with Radiohead, it’s refreshing to hear songwriter Thom Yorke and guitarist Jonny Greenwood embrace alt-rock once again on The Smile’s second studio album, “Wall Of Eyes“. That’s not to say the results are any less challenging than the duo’s earlier work; recorded at Abbey Road Studios, with producer Sam Petts-Davies and string arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra, “Wall Of Eyes” lives up to its status as one the most anticipated new albums of 2024 thanks to moments such as Yorke’s flirtation with hypnotic bossa nova textures on its title track and the lushly hypnotic folk that frames “Bending Hectic”. “I turn up with a bunch of phone recordings; doodles that are not even edited or formed and are fairly shapeless,” Yorke told NME of his songwriting process for the record. “We put them into shape then this thing appears that has this momentum.”

Anchored by the welcome input of jazz drummer Tom Skinner (Sons Of Kemet), Yorke’s thought-provoking songs of ambient-pop despair and psych-folk melancholia carry surreal and atmospheric undertones, easily making “Wall Of Eyes” one of the most richly rewarding listens among the best albums of 2024.

The Smile‘s second album, “Wall of Eyes” was released early 2024, following on from a hugely successful first release, “A Light For Attracting Attention“. I love this album. For me, The Smile have conquered the second album fear. The songs seem to have been approached in a way that makes this record feel incredibly wise and transformative. Sounds and textures so deliberate, alongside the words and melodies, creates some beautiful and complex stories. Although criticism depicts this album to be less of a treasure in comparison to their debut, I disagree. I would urge everyone to give this entire album a proper listen. It’s raw and brilliant and definitely worth the 45 minutes. 

In the eight years since Amyl and The Sniffers came together in Melbourne’s sticky pub-rock scene, Amyl and the Sniffers have become masters of balancing power and playfulness. With two critically acclaimed albums under their belt – 2019’s self-titled debut and 2021’s visceral “Comfort To Me” – vocalist Amy Taylor, guitarist Declan Mehrtens, bassist Gus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson have achieved something unique and remarkable.

Since the release of “Comfort to Me”, the band has seen their horizons broaden exponentially in every way. And it’s this attitude – bigger, brighter, smarter, sharper – that’s fuelling their third album, “Cartoon Darkness”. Recorded with producer Nick Launay at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles, on the same desk that captured Nirvana’s Nevermind and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the latest Amyl offering is full of surprises.

Musically, Mehrtens, Romer and Wilson have written The Sniffers’ most diverse album yet. It stretches from classic punk to the glammy strut of recent single ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’ to the stormy balladry of ‘Big Dreams’ (which is a sonic gear shift worthy of the title).

“Cartoon Darkness” is about climate crisis, war, AI, tip-toeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern day god. It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness. 

There’s no escapism here, only raw assessments of reality. the world maybe ain’t so cool after all… though bands like the recently CoSigned Chat Pile are doing their part in making it more tolerable. Unrelenting touring has made their riff-hitting noise rock absolutely airtight, as captured on “Cool World“, a worthy follow-up to the OKC band’s 2022 blockbuster “God’s Country“.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has struck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift – a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

“Cool World” makes for an apt title of Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just “God’s country” to the entirety of humankind. “Cool World” covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,” says vocalist Raygun Busch.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavour of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on “Cool World” not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their song writing but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. “While we wanted our follow-up to “God’s Country” to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with “Cool World“, we’d want to stretch the definition of our “sound” to reflect our tastes beyond just noise rock territory,” reflects bassist Stin. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits.” Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, “Cool World” is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg of Uniform (Algiers, Drab Majesty, Metz) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

The proverbial thread tying all of the experimentation on “Cool World” together is the depth to which Chat Pile dissects the album’s theme of violence. Whether it be the cycle of creating and passively consuming literal and figurative violence on sister tracks “Camcorder” and “Tape”, the diminishment of crimes against humanity by way of foreign policy and colonialism on “Shame”, or the mental anguish of hopelessness on “The New World”, Cool World is an apocalyptically bleak record. Sure, Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”; what Chat Pile depicts on “Cool World” is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence.

“If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” explains Busch, “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – “Cool World” is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”

“Cool World” released via The Flenser on October 11th, 2024 

The band will release their 14th studio album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ this Friday (November 1st), marking their first full-length effort since 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream’. Robert Smith and co. have already shared two singles from the project, ‘Alone’ and ‘A Fragile Thing’.

The 16-year wait for their 14th record is finally over! And with it comes 16 years of weight, of loss, of grief, of struggle, all permeating the lyrical and instrumental content with a deep gravity that will be all too familiar for those also scarred and bruised by life’s indiscriminate knocks. 

Fortunately, it sounds absolutely huge and just like the spectral Cure of ‘Disintegration’. The guitars flit from icy harmonics to amp-energising, throaty roars – it is as much driven by despair as it is by a need to express their vitality. The continent-spanning sounds juxtaposing intimate lyrical confessions as beautifully as only these masters can. The world might seem lost, with yesterday no longer in reach, but fortunately, we can rest assured that The Cure are alongside us, forging a prism through which we can understand all that softly slips away.

Additionally, The Cure have been posting snippets of various other songs from the record via this website and a Whatsapp channel. These include ‘Drone:NoDrone’ and ‘And Nothing Is Forever’.

Now, the group have given fans a taste of the forthcoming ‘Warsong’. The instrumental begins with atmospheric organ chords and subtle percussion before electric guitar, plucky keyboard and drums are introduced.

‘Warsong’ represented a more “gloomy” side of the album, describing it as “a pummelling sludge of noise that mourns “the hope of what we might have been“. The Cure are scheduled to play a special intimate gig at the BBC Radio Theatre in London tomorrow (October 30) ahead of another small show at the Troxy in the capital this Friday (November 1st). In a recent lengthy interview, Robert Smith revealed that The Cure have another new album that’s “virtually finished”, with a third record in the pipeline as well. He also shared his plans for a world tour in 2025 and discussed the band’s upcoming 50th anniversary.

“The frontman suggested that another two records may be arriving at some point, but ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ feels sufficient enough for the wait we’ve endured, just for being arguably the most personal album of Smith’s career. Mortality may loom, but there’s colour in the black and flowers on the grave.”