The Fat Angel Sings

This is a record of opposites colliding – of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution. While the music has an effervescence and an elegiac uplift, most of the words deal with the cold analysis of the self (the exception being the three lyrics by James Dean Bradfield which look for and hopefully find answers in people, their memories, language and beliefs).

The music is energised and at times euphoric. Recording could sometimes be sporadic and isolated, at other times we played live in a band setting, again the opposites making sense with each other.

Ten out of 12 tracks from “Critical Thinking” made the cut for Keith Cameron’s selection of Manics tracks in MOJO’s Book Of The Year, 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure – a strong indicator of the consistent quality of this, the band’s 15th album. The rousing anthems recalled the band’s ’80s antecedents as much as their mid-’90s commercial peak; the elegantly jangly “Dear Stephen“, meanwhile, provided a timely grappling with the ongoing complexities of being a Smiths fan.

There are crises at the heart of these songs. They are microcosms of meaninglessness in a world so brutal and divided, at an age when so many different kind of failures have been witnessed. What is the point in a song – thus the shift towards the internal. Start with yourself, maybe the rest will come.

The artwork for the album is by the world renowned Magnum photographer David Hurn. It evokes these feelings of uncertainty doubt and desire. 15 studio albums in, perhaps it should be like this. We’ve covered a lot of ground, the lines on the cover don’t quite connect, mirroring our current dilemma.

1. Critical Thinking
An address to the self and wider culture – a challenge to the cliched naivety of ‘Be Kind’ culture + the cults of mindfulness and wellness – dripping with sarcasm and rejection. Also a call for realism and a warning to keep your perspective sharp and in focus – question before you accept. The sound is jagged and awkward – echoes of post punk touchstones P.i.L., Gang of Four, Shriekback and the tonal cadence of The Whipping Boy. When it was written, I’d been reading The Handover by David Runciman and The New Leviathans by John Gray, realising how willing we can be to give so much of ourselves away – how gullible the human race is.

2. Decline and Fall
Using the past to push into the future – Richard Jobson’s dancing and The Associates’ glitter ball on Top of the Pops. Lyrical themes of inertia and collapse as the music propels you on and on – hyper-capitalism, digital malaise, managed decline. Trust + joy to be found in the tiny miracles that remain ‘dry stone walls’ + the comfort of the familiar.

3. Brushstrokes of Reunion
Nods to imperial-era Waterboys, particularly the love and desperation of Rags – R.E.M. Life’s Rich Pageant meets classic Manics crunch + velocity. Lyrically, about the hypnotic quality of a painting that’s inherited from someone who has passed.

4. Hiding in Plain Sight
Anne Sexton’s line ‘I am a collection of dismantled almosts’ really resonated and was the spark for the song – the lyrics and the music flowed and I’d written the whole thing in an hour. The song unfolds in 3 acts – a facing the mirror moment – an admission of self hatred – a forlorn act of nostalgic resistance. Layer upon layer of longing. The Only Ones, Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me), Kirsty MacColl / Mazzy Star backing vocals. A song in love with its own sense of regret.

5. People Ruin Paintings
The narcissism of adventurers + explorers, the hypocrisy of the carbon footprint – the empty evangelism of the television travel show drenched in a cynical inverted nihilism. Man’s insatiable addiction to discover and use. The gentle lilt of 10,000 Maniacs. Musically the three of us playing telepathically, referencing thirty plus years of playing together instinctively.

6. Dear Stephen
A song triggered by a postcard sent to me by Morrissey in 1984 wishing that I ‘get well soon’ – a song torn between opposites – an elegy to forgiveness and how tactile objects still have the power to comfort + soothe – an examination of my own shortcomings as seen through my love of The Smiths mirrored by shimmering guitars and a rhythm section in complete harmony. Rattlesnakes-era Lloyd Cole, the tenderness of the Pretenders.

7. (Was I) Being Baptised
Written about a day spent in the company of Allen Toussaint, being inspired by his patience, eloquence and natural skill as a storyteller. A meditation on quiet dignity + resistance. Written with a nod to the yearning spiritual, flowing with the gentle ease + grace of the Weather Prophets. The motif at the start of the song is a nod to the intro of Glen Campbell’s Southern Nights, written by Toussaint.

8. My Brave Friend
A declaration of remembrance, a hymn to friendship + loss, an old troubled song brought back to life by sorrow + memory. Scott Walker No Regrets, Bryan Ferry Jealous Guy.

9. Out of Time Revival
A song about the fruitless search for answers and optimism and looking for them in all the wrong places. Putting too much pressure on memories + cultural signposts and trying to distil everything down to something more pragmatic. Inspired by the rhythm track of When Doves Cry and Drastic Plastic by Be Bop Deluxe.

10. Deleted Scenes
Our version of the pure pop glitter of the alternative ’80s – The Cure, Strawberry Switchblade, Voice of the Beehive, The Bangles. A fantasy – a folly of desire + fear – the possibility of self destruction – drunk on hatred + love. Again, opposites colliding, trying to make sense together.

11. Late Day Peaks
My wife came back from an exhibition of Gwen John’s paintings with a copy of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist – a biography in verse that traces the life of the painter. The book made me appreciate finding joy in the smallest things. The song is an autumnal goodbye to the past – a recognition of place + time – the precious nature of interior life – the golden glow of doing nothing.

12. One Man Militia
The cold analysis of self-delusion – the shame of self censorship – the self-indulgent nature of art – the disaster of men. Written on the day of the Queen’s funeral when I locked myself in the studio with (producer) Loz Williams. Later, the three of us summoned the spirit of the Pistol’s No Fun + World Destruction by Lydon/Bambaataa – the constant push to take a side – the impossibly of reasoned debate in the cesspit of digital oblivion.

“Critical Thinking” is released on February 7th.

The divorce of Americana royalty Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires provided source material for both artists on their 2025 solo albums: a compelling if sometimes unnerving opportunity to hear opposing sides of the story.  Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit are masters of big-stage country-rock dynamics, but Isbell is going in a very different direction on “Foxes In The Snow“, his brand new album that he’ll release in a few weeks. “Foxes In The Now” is a fully solo-acoustic album, recorded without any help from the 400 Unit. Isbell made the whole thing in a five-day stretch at New York’s famed Electric Lady Studios last fall, and he played the same guitar, a 1940 Martin acoustic antique, on every song. 

Jason Isbell recorded “Foxes in the Snow” without his usual backing band, the 400 Unit, and outside of a marriage that turned into a muse. What’s to become of Isbell’s career without that spark? This is the sound of figuring that out. There’s introspection about what it all means, even what his own old songs now mean, but he’s also become angrier and more lyrically impulsive. Isbell has been stripped bare, and you hear it everywhere on this new album. He’s never had more main-character energy. The results are often cathartic, and sometimes a little jarring, but “Foxes in the Snow” is a grower. It draws us in more deeply with each spin.

“Foxes In The Snow” is not a Belle And Sebastian cover, and I wonder if the similarity between Isbell’s title and that of the B&S classic “Fox In The Snow” is intentional. “Foxes In The Snow” is a simple, bluesy love song.

Jason Isbell is a contemporary songwriter who blends rock, folk, and country into a unique sound that resonates with many. His emotional lyrics and storytelling ability have garnered him critical acclaim, yet he remains underappreciated by the mainstream.

Albums like “Southeastern” and “The Nashville Sound” showcase his ability to tackle personal and societal issues with grace and honesty. Isbell’s music often reflects his own struggles with addiction and recovery, making it deeply relatable.

He has won multiple Grammy Awards, yet his name is often overlooked in discussions about the best songwriters of his generation. His songs are like windows into his soul, offering a glimpse of his personal journey and struggles.

Southeastern Records marketed and distributed by Thirty Tigers Released on: 14th February 2025

Bon Iver returned with “Sable”, an EP of three mostly-acoustic songs that were his most stripped-back since “For Emma, Forever Ago”, but with the kind of grizzled reflection that’s to be expected of the 17 years of life Justin Vernon lived since that pivotal debut album. It seemed like a return to form, but as Justin put it in a recent interview with The New York Times, it was more like “the last gasping breath of my former self that really did feel bad for himself.” Those three songs now double as the first three tracks of the new full-length Bon Iver album, “Sable, Fable”, and the rest of the album is a more modern representation of Bon Iver, which transformed over the years from Justin’s solo project into a many-membered collective.

The difference is really clear by the fifth track, “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” a dose of soulful, funky, R&B-infused pop that counteracts Bon Iver’s sadboy era with positivity, joy, and rhythm. “I’m not saying nothing bad about the old stuff,” he said in that NYT interview, “but now I’m just much more like, hey, we don’t got much time left to live — let’s be sexy.”

Justin Vernon is finally happy! And he sounds perhaps more enchanting as a man embracing joy as he did as a lone wanderer in the wintery woodlands of Wisconsin. The album opens on familiar ground with the Sable tracks, and these build beautifully until we reach Fable and Vernon exclaims: “January ain’t the whole world”. From there on the album is a gorgeous celebration of accepting love and happiness through some incredibly vibey and experimental songs in the Bon Iver signature. “If Only I Could Wait”, with Danielle Haim is a standout, alongside “Walk Home”, and the slow submergence into steady love through the album closers There’s a Rhythm and Au Revoir is simply perfect.

Sharon Van Etten has shifted her approach many times over her career, first releasing stripped down songs as a solo singer/songwriter before embracing bigger rock songs and more synth-driven material. With her latest, she and her band crafted a fully collaborative record of songs that came to life through looser jam sessions, and as a result, it’s the first album credited to Sharon van Etten and the Attachment Theory. Early singles like the Essential Track “Afterlife” find Van Etten and company delving into a darker art-pop sound that’s rich in its arrangement and with a little more goth in its bloodstream. 

Definitely couldn’t have predicted the impact of this one as I’d lost my way with SVE. With her new theory attached, however, the songs are harmoniously both more robust and complex, and more poised in their simplicity, with the intoxicating instrumentation shifting between weightlessness and heftiness.

There’s only the odd mention of parenting on Sharon Van Etten’s new album, co-written for the first time with her band, the Attachment Theory. But early years imprinting – one aspect of attachment theory – has lasting echoes in adult behaviour, and what we do to each other has long been a theme in the American singer-songwriter’s compelling work, so much so she trained as a counsellor and has ambitions to be a psychotherapist.

After a period hanging out with country-leaning fellow travellers such as Angel Olsen and Margot Price, Van Etten is back in rock mode for her seventh album overall, but with a twist: this record’s tonal choices often favour wafting, almost gothic resonances. Synths hover, Van Etten’s voice swoops; everything is gauze in a draught. There has always been something wonderfully smeared about her melodic voice, but the icy shadow in which everything here is cast often distracts from her searching songcraft, so replete with queries and ruminations. “Southern Life (What Must It Be Like”) is winningly mantric, one instance of simpatico between track and treatment. But Van Etten is on far more substantial 80s ground with Idiot Box, which has the scope and heft of Bruce Springsteen.

From the off, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is sonically different from Van Etten’s previous work. Writing and recording in total collaboration with her band for the first time, Van Etten finds the freedom that comes by letting go – letting go of her normal modus operandi or the need for control or attachment to the outcome. No safety net. It’s somewhat terrifying, but also liberating. The result of that liberation is an exhilarating new dimension of sound and songwriting. The themes are timeless, classic Sharon – life and living, love and being loved – but the sounds are new, wholly realized and sharp as glass.

This new approach–releasing music under this new moniker–began with inviting her bandmates into the creative process. Rehearsing in the desert for an upcoming tour, Van Etten describes an epiphany: “For the first time in my life I asked the band if we could just jam. Words that have never come out of my mouth – ever! But I loved all the sounds we were getting. I was curious – what would happen?” Magic, apparently. “In an hour,” she says, “we wrote two songs that ended up becoming ‘I Can’t Imagine’ and ‘Southern Life’.”

A stark and dark doom synth sequence opens the album and lead song “Live Forever”. A crack of sharp, electronic white noise propels the track with a frenetic urgency, as Van Etten asks the question that we all have to answer eventually:

“Who wants to live forever?
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter…”

This type of wisdom didn’t always come easy for Van Etten. She has been an artist in control of her powers for many years; but now, working in lockstep with this band, that wisdom permeates in new ways. “Afterlife” is a case in point: popcorn synths mesmerize as they dance around the words and melody. Despite the subject matter (will those we love still be with us when our lives end?), or maybe because of it, it’s elevated by The Attachment Theory’s new sound. The music is sweetly cascading, almost euphoric.

“Somethin’ Ain’t Right” is both moody and contagiously danceable, powered by sequenced synth from keyboardist/vocalist Teeny Lieberson, an ostinato that weaves together the whole track into a cohesive whole. “Fading Beauty” begins with a barely audible musical motif before Van Etten’s voice creeps in like smoke. Here, Van Etten deepens the discourse that animates so much of her catalogue, exploring what it is to be simply human. This is her genius – oblique, but also relevant and personal.

The foundation of The Attachment Theory is Jorge Balbi on drums, as Van Etten says, “Jorge has really beautiful feel, he can stay behind the beat. So, he’s got that sensitivity… He’s open to exploring different kinds of technology, which I’m still learning about myself.” Van Etten describes bassist Devra Hoff as “very sensitive to melodies. I was so excited to play with a bass player that was driving and melodic,” she says, “and very sensitive to the songwriting.”

The trio was completed by Teeny Lieberson on keys/vocals. “It’s a very spiritual thing,” explains Van Etten, “to sing harmonies with somebody and just sing together in general. Her sense of harmony is incredible. All the textures that I wouldn’t intuitively use. I haven’t had that in a really long time.” Lieberson continues, “it is rare for me to feel completely at ease in the studio, especially coming from working mostly with male producers. I believe this is one of the few times I’ve felt encouraged and completely free in my creativity.”

Producer Marta Salogni (Bjork, Bon Iver, Animal Collective, Mica Levi) added another vital element, as both a connector and a producer renowned for her skills with synthesizers and electronics. “Her love of synths and sense of adventure was a huge draw to me. Her predilection for tapes and analog instruments was super exciting.” Salogni also proved adept at balancing the group, “facilitating many different personalities, fielding ideas from the different perspectives and making sense of the collective thoughts,” Van Etten continues. “I wanted to ensure the band that I would find a producer who would embrace the darkness and the unique sounds we had honed in the writing process.”

While it was conceived in the desert, the album’s recording took place in London. Here, the band’s mystical mix of electronics and analog textures found a perfect match at Eurythmics’ former studio, The Church.

Reflecting on this new artistic frame of mind, Van Etten muses, “Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes you feel stuck. It’s like every day feels a little different – just being at peace with whatever you’re feeling and whoever you are and how you relate to people in that moment. If I can just keep a sense of openness while knowing that my feelings change every day, that is all I can do right now. That and try to be the best person I can be while letting other people be who they are and not taking it personally and just being. I’m not there, but I’m trying to be there every day.”

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is a quantum leap in that direction. 

Sharon Van Etten (Lead Vocals, Guitar)
Jorge Balbi (Drums, Machines)
Devra Hoff (Bass, Vocals)
Teeny Lieberson (Synth, Piano, Guitar, Vocals)

released February 7th, 2025

While John Grant busied himself with his Creep Show side-project, Bella Union’s supersub Brian Christinzio brilliantly seized his chance. The New Jersey-born, Manchester-resident, Christinzio’s sixth BC Camplight LP presented a litany of trauma – most recently, the end of a long-term relationship – as a kind of tragicomic, self-deprecating musical, its memorable showstoppers delivered by an unreliable narrator in a Kermit onesie who could claim, audaciously, that It Never Rains In Manchester.

A baroque pop auteur who fit snugly into a triumvirate with labelmates John Grant and Father John Misty, Brian Christinzio also shared their ability to make simultaneously wry, accessible and moving music about personal trauma. His seventh album pivoted on how he was abused in his teens by an adult at summer camp – and how he would speak to that abuser three decades on: “I don’t want to hate anything anymore.”

Memories can be like doors. Most of these mnemonic doors are left wide open, allowing one to go in and out when necessary. However some memory doors have been slammed shut, locked and bolted. A “Don’t Come In” warning sign being affixed like a teenager’s bedroom. Brian Christinzio (known musically as BC Camplight) has many closed doors in his mental bank.

Over the course of his discography, the Manchester-based American has used humour – containing sarcasm and pop culture references – as a distraction from opening the entrances to his demons. Even using this technique when trying to make sense of the recent breakdown of his long term relationship. 

“A Sober Conversation” is the 45-year-old’s attempt – rather humanly he fails at times – to tackle his worst problems head on; depression, alcoholism, fear of fatherhood. As well as bravely confessing for the first time that the root of his mental problems is mostly like an incident of childhood abuse.

BC Camplight’s 7^th album, as the album title suggests, is essentially a series of awakening conversations. Mostly sung but also can be just spoken. Sometimes the conversations are with a female companion, which is the case on ‘Two Legged Dog’ (The Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris) and ‘Bubbles In The Gasoline’ (Peaness’s Jessica Branney). Such is his mental state, the conversations are also with imagined characters or imagined situations; whether taking place at present time or reciting them as if they happened in the past. Ultimately, he is unleashing his deep dark thoughts to the listener but in the kind of indirect way that a shy person who avoids eye contact or constantly dresses up in a persona would chat.

Softening her sound without sacrificing her edge, Billy Nomates takes a great artistic leap forward on her third and best album to date. “Metalhorse” is presented as a concept album, based in a dilapidated funfair. The title track evokes a merry-go-round, while The Test takes us into a hall of mirrors. However, aside from those references and the odd rinky-dink keyboard flourish, the idea doesn’t really get in the way. The ambition and scope of this record will take many by surprise. Fierce humour was her initial trademark, but times have indeed changed: these days, a wider emotional range is required. When they bring the curtain down on 2025, expect Billy Nomates to stand tall among this year’s winners.

Tor Maries, to use her given name, burst on to the scene in the midst of the pandemic with her spiky debut release. It was a searing and scathingly funny despatch from life on the margins in the UK. With devastating precision, she chronicled dead-end jobs in factories, offices and supermarkets, while looking askance at the “hippy elite” who somehow floated above all the “happy misery” around her.

Her first attempt to expand her reach came with “Cacti” in 2023, which turned out to be a transitional album. The rage was still there on songs such as “Spite”, while others cried out for a fuller treatment than Maries’s multi-instrumental self-sufficiency could provide. Now, on “Metalhorse”, Billy Nomates has bandmates at last, as well as some ace melodies to sweeten her lyrical insights.

The sound is broader and smoother than before, with prominent piano and multi-tracked vocals, plus an array of sly sound effects. At the same time, rhythm section Mandy Clarke on bass and Liam Chapman on drums preserve the music’s grit and maintain its punky integrity.

The brooding, Hugh Cornwell-assisted “Dark Horse Friend” (“you struck a deal with the other side”) is one of the finest pop tunes you will hear all year. Other songs, particularly “Life’s Unfair” and “Strange Gift”, hint at the pain Maries has undergone in recent times following the death of her father. And her own personal struggle comes out in Nothing Worth Winnin, which portrays the music industry as a fairground where the prizes are worthless.

Yet for every darker moment, there is one of true transcendence, especially the sublime, uplifting Plans. While Billy Nomates’ “comedic timing” – still intact, for all that – allows her to laugh in the face of doom, the redemptive power of love wins out over the impending apocalypse.

“They’ve got plans for us/But while the city rusts/Let’s get away,” she sings. “I bet they’re really bad,” she adds, before snarling: “Sky high AI, World War Three, ah fuck it,” and concluding: “The end of the world should not come between us.”

Even so, disaster finally strikes in the closing track, just when we were all facing the other way. “Everything just goes/When the moon explodes/And all this time you spent looking at the sun.” No one can say Maries doesn’t think big.

“Metalhorse” is presented as a concept album, based in a dilapidated funfair. The title track evokes a merry-go-round, while The Test takes us into a hall of mirrors. However, aside from those references and the odd rinky-dink keyboard flourish, the idea doesn’t really get in the way.

For too long, it had been depressingly easy to categorise Evan Dando as a great talent squandered. 2025, though, brought a sober reckoning with his past in the shape of a meaty memoir, plus his first album of new songs in 19 years. Extremely good songs, too, recorded in São Paulo, that mixed the old scrappy joie de vivre with hard-won wisdom. Among the guests – Juliana Hatfield, J Mascis and key songwriting foil Tom Morgan, as you’d hope.

‘Fear of Living’, a reflective upbeat slice of perfect pop with a grittier Evan at the helm and a riff that’s plucked from the very heart of rock ‘n’ roll.

Playing all the instruments on the recording, the new single was recorded and produced by Apollo Nove at A9 Audio in São Paulo, Brazil. Evan is also currently working on the first Lemonheads songs since 2006. ‘Fear Of Living’ was written by the late Dan Lardner of QTY and Evan Dando. Dan was a close friend of Evan’s who passed in June of 2023. “I met with Dan in 2022, he sent me ‘Fear Of Living’, I added some riffs and things, and he said he liked it. I shall miss you, Dear Prince, ever the most dignified person in the room.”

Deeply confessional and magical indie folk. From: Edinburgh, Scotland, For fans of: Jeff Buckley, Adrianne Lenker. Though they’ve only released a spattering of singles to date, Jacob Alon’s remarkably assured voice and deeply poetic outlook already set them up to etch their name into a canon of singer-songwriters who weave magic from the ordinary fabric of life.

They daydream of a world more whimsical than the one we find ourselves in – and, when you hear Alon’s imposing vocals, forged in Edinburgh’s folk clubs and defined by their devastating simplicity and clarity – you’ll find yourself tiptoeing into it, too.

Heatworms’ striking debut album is a modern classic, fusing post-punk, darkwave and electronic influences into nine edgy, tension-filled tracks. Never shying away from the thorny issues of the day, it tells its tales with a theatrical flourish. For all of its intensity, it delivers a compulsive floor-filling danceability that should have packed the smoke-filled dancefloors of any good alternative club night.

It’s no small compliment when I say that listening to “Glutton For Punishment” left me with a serious knot in my chest. Heartworms is the musical alias of 26-year-old Jojo Orme, and she prides herself on this fractured, often dread-inducing discourse within the songs she creates. Her 2023 EP “A Comforting Notion” was a brief encapsulation of Heartworms’ pronounced style—a mashup of dark post-punk and hardcore industrial, but it left Orme feeling bogged down by the genre-defining expectations it set in place. Instead, “Glutton For Punishment” is a dilated full-length debut, rooting itself in the minimalist aesthetics of late ‘90s UK dance and carving paths into amenable pop hooks while retaining that atmosphere of overall chaos and emotional discomfort. Standout tracks like “Jacked” and “Warplane” are a far cry from the sounds of her EP.

Orme sings about the haunting effects of war-torn violence, the flawed perspective of the human condition and the many shattered relationships she’s faced throughout her life, draped behind sharp, stinging guitars and ethereally warped techno beats. Orme elaborated on the musical growth Heartworms underwent in crafting the debut record saying: “With my EP, people kind of pigeonholed me into post-punk. I was like, ‘Cool, I can do that, but I can also do way more’—I can do post-punk, but I can also be poppy and catchy, and this album represents that. I think people might be surprised when they hear it.” 

“It is rare to see artists come bolting out the gate with such a strong identity, but here is someone who knows exactly who they are, what they want, and still daring to achieve more.”

For Nottingham quartet Divorce, home is a feeling. Initially meeting as teenagers through the city’s close-knit DIY scene, the band – completed by members Tiger Cohen-Towell (vocals / bass), Felix Mackenzie-Barrow (vocals / guitar), Adam Peter Smith (guitar / synth) and Kasper Sandstrøm (drums) – came together as Divorce in mid-2021, releasing a slew of genre-defiant singles that quickly caught the attention of tastemakers the world over.

Sonically rich and lyrically open-hearted, ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’ sees Divorce assemble a shelter for themselves amid the chaos and leave the front door open to everyone. This album pays homage to seeking place and home; one of the great human levellers.

Much of life feels at odds with this particular need. And to Goldenhammer; you are a reason to keep driving. We will find you again and again!