The Fat Angel Sings

Peter Gabriel has announced a new album and shared the first taster from the record ‘Been Undone’.

“I’m delighted to say that tonight, at the full moon, we will be beginning another year of full moon releases under the name ‘o\i'”  The release, which is the follow up to 2023’s ‘i/o’, will once again see him release a new song every time there is a full moon, with the full LP set to drop by the end of the year.

Each song on ‘o/i’ will come with “differing interpretations in the shape of Dark-Side and Bright-Side mixes”, according to a press release. The first single ‘Been Undone’ is a Dark-Side Mix by Tchad Blake,

Each track on the new album will be accompanied by a piece of art and ‘Been Undone’ is accompanied by Ciclotrama 156 (Palindrome) by São Paulo–based artist Janaina Mello Landini.

“The first artwork is a special piece from Janaina Mello Landini. The way she takes the rope and moves it out, unravelling it, is almost like fractals or tree trunks and looks like the brain in some ways too, so I see a lot of entry points,” said Gabriel.

“I am delighted that Janaina is willing to participate and be part of the process. We are using one of her existing images for this month to open the whole proceedings but I’m excited that she’s now going to create a piece, especially for the song. That always gives it a little more excitement from my end to see what’s going to come up. Please do check out her work.”

The track was written and produced by Gabriel and recorded at Real World Studios, Bath and The Beehive in London.

Of the album, he said: “I’m delighted to say that tonight, at the full moon, we will be beginning another year of full moon releases under the name ‘o\i’. The songs are a mix of thoughts and feelings.

“I have been thinking about the future and how we might respond to it. We are sliding into a period of transition like no other, most likely triggered in three waves; AI, quantum computing and the brain computer interface. Artists have a role to look into the mists and, when they catch sight of something, to hold up a mirror.”

Gabriel went on to say that “these are my lumpy bits – i/o: the inside has a new way out and o\i: the outside has a new way in”.

He added: “We are not, and have never been, the exclusively self-determining, independent beings that have been given the run of the world. We are something else, a part of nature, a part of everything and feeling a connection, shaking our booty and giving and receiving some love can help us find our place – and put a big smile on our faces.

“Some of these songs are going to form part of the brain project that I’ve been exploring for a number of years, and some just make me feel happy. I hope you like them.”

Perhaps the follow-up to Hotline TNT’s 2023 breakout “Cartwheel” wouldn’t sound so bright, anthemic, and grandiose – in other words, uninterested in sticking to stylistic trappings – had the lovely sentiments of its predecessor not been amplified by devotion and confidence, not to mention the dynamism of Will Anderson’s touring band joining him in the studio. After many months of the road, the frontman was eager to return to the familiar, for him, introverted process of making another album, but guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, drummer Mike Ralston, and producer Amos Pitsch convinced him otherwise. If nothing else, “Raspberry Moon” is evidence that at least sometimes, such a leap of trust – for the people in the songs no less than the ones making them pays off.

After writing and recording his first two Hotline TNT albums almost exclusively on his own, Will Anderson decided it was time to go bigger. “Raspberry Moon” is the first Hotline TNT album made as a full band, and that added personnel is evident in the record’s heavy-hitting blend of power-pop and shoegaze. Amid all the fuzz, however, Anderson’s vocals still come out on top as he recounts the highs and lows of being newly in love. It’s a massive-sounding album for overwhelming emotions, with plenty of catchy melodies to help shake out the nerves.

Will Anderson – Guitar, Vocals Lucky Hunter – Guitar Haylen Trammel – Bass Mike Ralston – Drums

Hotline TNT performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded May 12th, 2025.

Songs: Break Right 00:40 Julia’s War 04:25 Candle 07:16 Son In Law 12:07

There’s nary a misstep to be heard on Messa’s fourth record and first studio effort in three years, “The Spin”. And, in another step of maturity and confidence, the Italian quartet ditched their Pallbearer-esque slow, heavy, chunk guitar sound from their previous full-lengths. The results are illuminating, in at least a few ways. For one, Messa’s compositions shine more brightly than ever before thanks to Alberto Piccolo’s and Marco Zanin’s shift to a more shoegazey guitar sound. For another, the band flaunting its ability to crafty catchy, metal-pop probably wasn’t too high on anyone’s bingo card.

Eleven years into their career, they achieve exactly that on “At Races” and penultimate track “Reveal,” which is the strongest song “The Spin” has to offer. The record also gives vocalist/percussionist Sara Bianchin more opportunities to showcase her expertise in singing without a lick of irony or pretense. Add in some intriguing passages pockmarked with synthesizers and horns, and what you have here is a great, if not perfect, record. 

Armed with chorus pedals, gated drums, and a mood board that simply read “The Eighties,” the Italian band Messa made their masterpiece. “The Spin” isn’t great because it successfully emulates familiar sounds but because it finds Messa making those sounds their own. There’s bouncy post-punk, smoldering power balladry, and noirish dark jazz here to augment the fundamentally doom metal core, but it’s all processed through the singular machine that is Messa — four generationally talented musicians whose symbiotic closeness you can hear in every note.

Released April 11th, 2025

Behold, the country-fried slow core album of your dreams! On “God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars”, Shallowater conjure the tumbleweed-strewn environs of their West Texas homeland in the form of patiently creeping pensive twang, but from time to time the gad-dang thing explodes like an improperly lit propane tank. The vibes are too dour to be described as immaculate, but you can just bask in this thing until it blows you away.

 There’s a wonderful synthesis of sounds on this album – it’s solid from the start until the finish, overall an excellent album and I hope this one gives them some more hype! 

Shallowater is possibly the best act in slowcore right now. Their debut was a great taste of the eventual magic that would appear here. The cohesion, the consistency, and oh my god that distorted guitar is absolute bliss! A truly marvelous record from one of the most promising talent around right now in the genre.

This Sunderland producer’s previous work included one EP of power electronics, one of antic club tracks, collabs with Aya and 96 Back as Microplastics, gigging with Kero Kero Bonito and a smattering of other credits. So her staggering, fully formed songwriterly debut was a total bolt from the blue. A swarming orchestral epic with shades of Julia Holter and Phil Elverum, it addressed her grief for her late father in serenely surrealist images – hitting a deer with a car in the middle of the night – and the painfully mundane realism of sitting in hospital corridors together.

The standout “Miss America” combined both to stunning effect, a numbed incantation of everything Walton had seen on the US trip where she learned of her father’s diagnosis, the familiar now remade horribly mythic.

Walton is a beloved figure across various sectors of the alternative music underground. Outside of her own music and soundtrack work, she has been a live drummer for Kero Kero Bonito, collaborates with Sarah Midori Perry on the pair’s Cryalot project, has remixed Metronomy and worked with Iceboy Violet, BABii and more. She recently contributed to London collective caroline’s acclaimed “caroline 2” album.

The first seeds of Walton’s debut album were sowed during touring North America in 2018, where whilst ticking off life-long music goals, Walton’s father was dying of cancer. Grief is a constant presence throughout “Daughters”, and specifically the surreal nature of having to process it amongst a blur of airports, flight connections, hotel rooms and battles for stolen medication with the American healthcare system. Strip malls, drug deals, panic attacks; the artificiality of downtown American city districts dovetailing with reality in its most brutal form. “Miss America” for a day while life is changed forever.

Weaving between real life diary entries, travelogue-style storytelling, imagery that ranges from mechanical to religious and a scattering of fiction (though we are obliged to mention that ‘Shelly’ is based on a true story), “Daughters” climaxes with the staggering run of ‘Saints’, ‘Miss America’ and its title track. Sampling unattended machines harmonising bleeps into the void in a London hospital ward, ‘Saints’ narrates Walton taking her father to and from cancer research trials, “sat, hunched and sick in the concourse as minutes became hours”. And to be very real for a moment, Jen is a friend, and first hearing the ‘Miss America’ demo is up there with the most emotional moments we’ve had in 15 years of running this record label.

Finished in London across the second half of 2024, “Daughters” features musical contributions from some of the closest friends and collaborators that Walton has made in her time as a musician: aya (who also mixed the album), Daniel S. Evans, Joshua Barfood and Nick Granata (all of Shovel Dance), Alex McKenzie (of caroline and Shovel Dance), Aga Ujma and Bob Lockwood.

Local Action is proud to present “Daughters“, the debut album by Jennifer Walton.

Lisa Knapp has long been an exciting folk singer and interpreter, with a range that’s open-hearted and wild, and her husband, Gerry Diver, is an innovative producer working with ease across folk, pop, film and TV. The couple’s first officially collaborative album includes a brilliant, cinematic rendition of the murder ballad “Long Lankin” and a moving, fragile rush through the emotions of Irish ballad “Lass of Aughrim”. Knapp’s spry facility with the fiddle in Monaghan Jig/Monks Jig Set also impresses, as does her spoken-word delivery of travelling snapshots in “Train Song”.

Since her 2007 debut, “Wild and Undaunted“, Londoner Lisa Knapp has blazed an impressive trail at the avant edge of British folk, her bravura vocals lighting up self-penned songs and well-loved standards, while the inventive arrangements of partner and producer Gerry Diver – now credited as co-creator – have helped capture the wyrdness, wonder and darkness of folklore.

On “Hinterland“, the pair repeat the trick to thrilling effect. Opener “Hawk & Crow” has Knapp at her larkish best, giving voice to a cast of birds over a stumbling, broken rhythm – a kind of elfin Tom Waits. The spoken-word “Train Song” relocates us to today’s mundane realities – “poplars tall, village hall, stately home, sewage works” – before “Star Carr” “whisks us back to the Mesolithic Yorkshire site where ritual headdresses of red deer antler hint at ancient raves.

The most transfixing song too few people heard in 2025 has actually been around for nearly 300 years. “Long Lankin”, an insanely violent traditional folk murder ballad, has been performed by musical ghouls since at least the 1750s. Far more recently, its dark soul has been conjured by trad stars as esteemed as Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Steeleye Span. Never, however, have I heard a version as bone-chilling as the one by the English folk star Lisa Knapp. (It appears on “Hinterland“, her first album co-credited to her longtime partner in music, life and, for all I know, crime, Gerry Diver). Knapp’s quavering soprano manages to sound, at once, pristine and menacing, a silky ghost of a thing equally skilled at seduction and threat. The clarity of her tone has a Sandy Denny purity, but her vibrato portends imminent danger, underscored by Diver’s creepy-crawly glockenspiel andPete Flood’s spooky drums, which have the jazzy surprise of Terry Cox’s work with Pentangle. While the musicians orchestrate the shifting perspectives of the lyric, Knapp delivers a vocal so arresting, you won’t know whether to shudder or swoon.

Along with intense fiddle playing from Diver, crepuscular instrumentation accompanies a clutch of traditional ballads; the tender romance of “I Must Away Love“, But the murderous “Long Lankin” and the forlorn “Lass of Aughrim“, the last with Knapp in heartbreaking form. She sings carefully throughout but remains unafraid to spill the odd yowl and yelp; you get the whole person. Folk at its most exalted.

In a year that saw the troubling rise of AI-generated slop music, there is something endlessly comforting about a song that can only have been written by a messy, complicated human. The first lines of Al Olender’s delightfully specific track “The Cyclone”, draw on a memory of driving to Queens to “try to get laid”, and from there the song takes our unwinding narrator to a Baltimore freeway, Planet Fitness bathroom, and, yes, the titular Coney Island attraction. It’s a well-trodden theme, though usually sung by classic dude troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt or Merle Haggard: no matter where she runs, she’s herself, and it’s a problem.

But the song’s crescendo is one of the prettiest, and lasting, that I have heard in a while. After losing love (or maybe it was just some guy), the singer resolves to replace all of her glass with paper plates – “things I cannot break”

“The Cyclone” off Al Olender’s sophomore record, ‘The Worrier’.

Iconic singer-songwriter Robert Forster returns with “Strawberries”, his ninth solo album, delivering a fresh yet unmistakable sound. Inspired by a simple moment at home—a bowl of irresistible strawberries—Forster weaves together a collection of observational stories that venture beyond personal introspection. With a mix of playful, character-driven narratives and atmospheric soundscapes, “Strawberries” is a new direction for Forster, whose legendary career spans the Go-Betweens and nearly three decades of solo work.

If 2023’s “The Candle And The Flame” documented Forster and family creatively responding to his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis, solo album number nine was less overtly personal; an album of fictions and innovations, recorded in Sweden with producer Peter Morén (of Peter, Björn & John). Cue, then, tales of noisy sex and gay crushes, uninhibited yelps and jazz-punk skronk; a songwriting craftsman investigating new territory without ever compromising his authentic voice.

We are very proud of this record and my fellow Tubs. we finally tried quite hard. it’s the most PERSONAL but also the most Rocking we’ve ever been. the former felt arduous at times and, especially on ‘strange’, and sometimes it felt a bit TMI but I’m glad I ‘went there’. but, as the latter hopefully demonstrates, there’s also a lot of fun and joy and lager in there. see you on the road xxx

London group The Tubs released one of 2023’s most underrated albums, “Dead Meat”, which saw the group—featuring the former members of Joanna Gruesome—pairing soaring pop melodies with an immaculate college rock jangle. Their follow-up to that album, “Cotton Crown”, is a more deeply personal affair, featuring songs written about grieving the death of his mother. And while the subject matter’s a bit heavier, their pop songwriting has only grown stronger, as on the harsher punk strum-along “Chain Reaction” or the infectious riffs of “Freak Mode,” which we dubbed the Essential Track. Though it’s an album defined by real pain, it’s nonetheless good for the soul. (We’ll have more on this one soon.)

“It’s quite fun for me to dredge up my most embarrassing or selfish moments,” Tubs frontman Owen Williams admitted. The second Tubs album was emotionally visceral, too, with a full-pelt intensity – think Hüsker Dü meets Richard Thompson – that made them instant favourites.

The Tubs performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded June 3rd, 2025.

Songs: Freak Mode 00:32 Round The Bend 03:45 Dead Meat 06:00 Narcissist 08:17 Sniveller 12:01 Wretched Lie 16:55 Owen Williams – Guitar, Vocals Devon Murphy – Bass Dan Lucas – Lead Guitar, Vocals Taylor Stewart – Drums

Also essential from 2025: Tubs twin band Ex-Vöid’s “In Love”, where Williams ceded most of the frontperson duties to Lan McArdle, tonally Linda Thompson to his Richard.

“Remembering Now” is a brand new studio album from the legendary Van Morrison, due out June 13th listen to its debut single, “Down to Joy,” As he approaches his 80th birthday, this album finds Van in a reflective mood. There are numerous echoes back to old songs, places and familiar themes. Undoubtedly his best release in many, many years and I say that as a lifelong fan.

After albums focusing on skiffle, rock’n’roll covers and duet versions of his back catalogue, Morrison’s 47th album (!) saw his still staggering voice back on the deep stuff – a heroic re-engagement with the mystic, with the muse William Blake and what he calls on page 54 “transcending the mundane”. Side Two, remarkably, held perhaps his best run of music in over 35 years, meditative, transported extemporisations that stood comparison with his very finest work.