The London five-piece Tom Dougall, Dominic O’Dair, Maxim Barron, Charlie Salvidge and Max Oscarnold release their first album on Tough Love and their fourth for the world. It’s recorded in home studios, mixed at Studio B in South London and completely self-produced. This extra material recorded and commisioned around the same time the original album was made. The deluxe version of Toy’s fourth album, “Happy In the Hollow”, is now available online. It includes the original album alongside new artwork and four rare or previously unavailable songs, as below.
Happy in the Hollow
The Willo (Sonic Boom remix)
Strangulation Day (Cosey Fanni Tutti remix)
Move Through the Dark (Daniel Melero & Yuliano Acri remix)
Aussie janglers The Stroppies return in fine form today with a new mini-album that wraps up their recording work from the last year. Vaulting off of their excellent album from last year, the band continues to capture the overcast sway of kiwipop from days past, calling back echoes of The Clean, Able Tasmans, and Tall Dwarfs. They buoy their sunny strums with heavy-sighed harmonies and a hummable heft of organ that gives the song staying power.
The band’s sticks to your ribs more than some of their peers with an ability to let angst and insecurity bask in the sun of their strums – giving their songs a more substantial kick then some of their cohorts. They continue their run at UK label Tough Love and while this might be another short one (something the band seems adept at) these eight songs still feel like a vital part of The Stroppies’ path. The LP descends to the decks on May 1st.
Taken from the record, Look Alive, out 1st May 2020 via Tough Love Records.
Peel Dream Magazine, the project of musician Joe Stevens, combines off-center dream pop with classic shoegaze soundscapes. Both their 2018 debut album Modern Meta Physic and forthcoming LP Agitprop Alterna (out on April 3rd via Slumberland Records) exude a hypnotic quiet-loud dynamic, often aided by blurry synths and serene vocals. Mixing the glaring with the pacifying, Peel Dream Magazine are an exercise in dazzling, retro-meets-modern drone. The band’s 2020 follow-up Agitprop Alterna is much broader, thanks in part to the live members that appear here like vocalists Jo-Anne Hyun and Isabella Mingione and drummer Brian Alvarez, and also due to its emphasis on a more dynamic sound. It’s a caressing record with satisfying moments that are felt long after they pass—take for instance the innocent, fluttering keys that close “Brief Inner Mission,” which transition into the wonderfully filtered vocals and blown-out guitars of “NYC Illuminati.” Agitprop Alterna is a loungey, droning, space-age odyssey that might help even the most anxious among us escape for a bit.
It’s not without good reason that people have been likening Peel Dream Magazine to My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab and Yo La Tengo. Helmed by Joe Stevens, one of New York’s finest contemporary players, the outfit makes music that’s tender but savage, powerful but delicate and packed with beautiful discordance hiding its sumptuous melodies. ‘Agitprop Alterna’ is their second full-length release and it certainly adds fuel to the argument that people need to take this lot very seriously. In addition to the aforementioned, here it nods to Velvet Underground (notice the tripped out, opiate-hazed interludes throughout the album) and krautrock-leaning art pop. The record drones, drives, grooves and perplexes on its course, but most of all it unarguably impresses. Or at least that’s what we’ve got to say on the matter
Agitprop Alterna is out everywhere today Shout to everyone who made this possible, most importantly Slumberland Records and Tough Love Records
As one of the most quintessentially ’80s-sounding bands, Soft Cell aren’t the easiest artist to cover. On their recent covers EP, “Songs of Consumption”, English psych outfit Toy decided to give it the old college try with the 1982 Soft Cell b-side “Fun City.” Frontman Tom Dougall’s layered vocals are far more ghostly than the earnest pop of Marc Almond. In Toy’s version, the keyboards are more robotic and twinkly than Soft Cell’s wonky new wave, plus the hopping guitar pulses are more pronounced. While the Soft Cell’s cut is more danceable, Toy’s version is far more icy, atmospheric and expansive and—dare I say—far superior to the original.
Following the announcement earlier this month of their forthcoming covers album ‘Songs Of Consumption’, Toy
have shared a further track ‘Down On The Street’, the classic Stooges track – here given a synth makeover – taken from the self-produced 8-song collection, released on November 15th via Tough Love Records.
The band have also announced a run of UK shows early next year as part of the Independent Venue Week 2020. These follow a couple of special shows next month.
Titled ‘Hollowed Out – A night of strange sighting and unhabitual ritual’, the shows will see them re-imagining songs from ‘Happy In The Hollow’, their fourth studio album released in January.
Taken from the album, Songs of Consumption, out 15th November.
Toy, who released Happy In The Hollow, their fourth, and by far most acclaimed album to date, in January of this year, have announced details of “Songs Of Consumption”, an 8-song collection of unique interpretations of tracks which have inspired the band.
Taking on a varied musical range from The Stooges via Amanda Lear to Soft Cell, the album, released on Friday 15th November 2019, will be available on LP, CD and digital formats. A hand-numbered edition of 300, 180gm seafoam green vinyl is available exclusively via Bandcamp and the Tough Love website.
Self-produced and recorded at home studios, the track listing of the album is as follows:
1. Down On The Street
2. Follow Me
3. Sixty Forty
4. Cousin Jane
5. Fun City
6. Lemon Incest
7. Always On My Mind
8. A Dolls House
Talking about the album, TOY said: “Songs of Consumption sonically is a continuation and development of the themes conceived on Happy In The Hollow and it will show people where we are going towards musically. The DIY approach was explored further utilising more of the electronic elements that we touched upon before. Drum machines, stripped down arrangements and rudimentary production give a primitive sound that we thought suited the choice of songs. Some of the songs have very big sounding production, so we wanted to experiment with them by going in a different direction.
Music is consumed voraciously now whereas these songs came from a time when the song was of the most important thing and that’s what was appreciated. Stripping them back to the essence of what they are was also something we wanted to explore. Also, we wanted to make a covers record with songs by people that influenced us in the past few years and it’s as much about the way they dealt with their ideas, and how they put themselves in uncomfortable situations in order to make something that in the end is simple. It’s a homage to the spirit of these people, that helped us to untangle ourselves from our inherent complicated nature and create a new space where we can exist.”
Additionally, having played a sold-out tour of the UK in February, including a mesmerising show at Village Underground in London, the band have announced a couple of very special shows at the end of the year.
Playing under the banner of ‘Hollowed Out – A night of strange sighting and unhabitual ritual’ the shows will see them re-imagining songs from Happy In The Hollow.
London trio Value Void are an offbeat proposition. their debut album “Sentimental” on Tough Love is a collection of luxuriantly deep, shag pile-warm, analogue proto-punk. Paz Maddio and Marta Zabala grew up with each other in Azul, a small town south of Buenos Aires, where the seeds of this project were sown. They collaborate in the same way that Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote songs, with Marta penning lyrics then taking them to Paz to spin them in to music.
Marta first came to London on tour with the super-slanted art punks Los Cripis, where she met Luke Tristram (of Cop, Score and Owner) who released their record via his Unwork label. Paz followed to join them and scrape rent from the city’s bars and cafes.
By early 2017 the three of them were holed up in practice rooms, Luke adding Evens-esque basslines that laid concrete to their minimalist guitar-lead pop songs. Originally as WVS, they started playing shows with bands that had once orbited the tiny Power Lunches venue in Hackney and, since its death, were now to be found on bills at DIY Space, New River Studios and other dusty successors of its autonomous, cheap drink, creative-friendly spirit. In common with bands like Shopping, rudimentary surroundings and resources fed into nonetheless ambitious, hooky work. Songs such as “Teen For Him,” a self-effacing lark importing strains of Leslie Gore and the Velvets; the minimal, Guided by Voices-reminiscent chug of “Bariloche” and “Cupids Bow,” an up tempo, Breeders-esque standout, were lynch pins of a pummeling, inspired set.
In April of that year, they recorded with Euan Hinshelwood of Young Husband at the studio TVT, in an overlooked corner the other side of Blackheath, tucked under giant knots of flyover on the way to Charlton in South East London.
The intention was casual but the results, seven dazzlingly assured songs nailed in a couple of days, sucked attention from several quarters as they skipped between hard drives. They secured a tour with Frankie Cosmos and signed to London label Tough Love, who released the single “Back In The Day” in May 2018.
Upon deciding to flesh the songs out for a full length, they returned to TVT studios with Euan in April this year, tweaking the mix and laying down two new songs: “Mind,” a down tempo lullaby/lament in which the band track into the territory of early St. Vincent, Grouper or Julianna Barwick, supported by a raw dirge that blossoms in feedback, and “The Deluge,” which is also reflective but structured by a roaming curiosity and big chorus seeking road movie oblivion.
The album is instantly affecting, with an ease and clarity that suits the elegance of the lyrics: coded love songs and cool reflections on life which are all the more vulnerable and touching sung in Paz Maddio’s lilting, ultrachromatic voice – a ceramic-sharp diagonal transatlantic on a pure open tone, with subtle waves of vibrato at its top end. It’s a particular heart breaker on tracks such as “Babeland” and “Dead Ladies Lament”.
Restricted to a palette of drums, bass, guitar and double tracked vocals caught on 2″ tape, coloured here and there with a daub of feedback or a passage of ground-shifting tape delay, this is the sort of thing that gets called “stripped back”. It speaks to the powerful understatement at the heart of their style, but it fails to capture the crafty, delicate, taught and spaced-out ride Value Void subject you to: a species of NY proto-punk and Californian post-hardcore born miraculously from London’s piss swilling street level like religious icons in toast.
Brighton, England’s Toy have released their first new music since their third LP, 2016’s Clear Shot.
The krautrock five-piece unveiled two new tracks, “The Willo” and “Energy,” for a limited edition 12-inch single, out Friday, Sept. 14, via Tough Love Records. The 12-inch is the band’s debut release for the label and it will also serve as the first taste of their unnamed forthcoming fourth studio album, which will be released in January 2019.
Toy have earned a reputation as a band of integrity, virtuosity and taste, with Tom, Maxim, Dominic, Charlie and (joining in 2015) Max creating a sound that is embedded in the underground tradition, yet distinctly their own. Now here comes a two-track twelve-inch on Tough Love, a foretaste of a forthcoming album in January 2019, which marks a new dawn for this most singular of bands. The Willo is a dreamlike, seven-minute glide, redolent of a forest at sunset and just as pretty, but not without hints of malevolence. Maxim’s fingerpicking acoustic melds with electric twang from Dominic, and a whirling organ from Max Oscarnold gives this elegant creation an extra layer of disorientation and depth. “People appear to have seen Will-o’-the-wisp, a mysterious green-blue light, over the centuries. It generally means something ominous is about to happen”, says Tom.
“The Willo” opens with electronic percussion and acoustic guitar as the band’s ghostly ringleader and frontman Tom Dougall warns of a sinister ray of light, which has become woven into English folklore. The song hovers with Max Oscarnold’s (also of Proper Ornaments) whispering, psychedelic synths, twinkling guitars and Dougall’s eerie yet calming vocals, which culminate into a slowly unfolding, hauntingly beautiful track that highlights what the band does best: scrupulous writing and musicianship with equal parts brooding and dazzling.
Then there is Energy, which lives up to its name with thunderously metronomic drums from Charlie Salvidge and a ferocious guitar from Dominic O’Dair. The lyrics, culled from a story written by Max about a nighttime ritual, are obscured by the barrage-like forward momentum of the music. The twelve-inch, recorded and mixed by the band between Oscarnold’s Stoke Newington flat and a south London studio, is the first release for Toy on their new label Tough Love, representing the latest stage in the evolution of the band. Since their inception, they have released the acclaimed albums Toy (2012), Join The Dots (2013) and Clear Shot (2016), and toured everywhere from Serbia to China, while holding onto that youthful, magical moment of discovering strange new worlds of innocence and experience.
“People appear to have seen Will-o’-the-wisp, a mysterious green-blue light, over the centuries,” says Dougall of the inspiration behind “The Willo,” the single’s A-side. “It generally means something ominous is about to happen.”
On their fourth album, Northern Ireland’s Girls Names plunge themselves down into a dark, dark place. It’s not as immediate as previous efforts, but I think I like this new one more than anything they’ve done so far. It brings to mind the moody “difficult” post punk the Sound’s All Fall Down and Comsat Angels’ Sleep No More.
‘Karoline’, the latest song to be taken from our new album Stains on Silence, out 15th June on Tough Love Records
Young London-based trio Value Void share the intriguing first glimpse into their forthcoming debut LP, due later this year on Tough Love Records. On their sneakily infectious debut single “Back in the Day“, the group, comprised of Paz Maddio (guitar + vocals), Marta Zabala (drums), and Luke Tristram (bass), rides that taut, moody post-punk groove into a soaring chorus that feels like pure, sweet catharsis. The brief parting of the clouds is fleeting, though, as Maddio’s almost sunnily anthemic kiss-off — “Without any rules, I don’t want to play” — is enveloped by the return of her wiry riff, the song sliding back into tension and uncertainty. Listen below + grab the song now on Value Void’s bandcamp page:
Girls Names release their new album, Stains on Silence, on 15th June. The album is available on several different vinyl formats, with two different front covers:
black vinyl w/ cream cover
orange vinyl w/ black cover (indie stores only -300 copies)
ultral clear vinyl w/ black cover & poster (online only – 200 copies)
It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release.
Following 2015’s blitzing Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void. “There was a finished – and then aborted – mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,” reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. “We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled out from the stress of rushing the record and not being happy with it, as well as being skint with no impending touring on the cards and constantly having to worry about rent.”
The stumbling blocks that proved a strain became the album’s defining breakthrough. Recorded in various locations including Belfast’s Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley, Cully’s home and the band’s practice space, spontaneous creation, cut-up techniques and self-editing took centre-stage for the first time. “We started tearing the material apart and rebuilding, re-editing and re-recording different parts in my home in early Autumn last year,” says Cully. “When we got them to a place we were happier with we went back into Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley to finalise the mixes to what they are now.”
Where AAAV proved a brazen statement of intent, Stains on Silence bounds forth as its feature-length comedown. What could have seen the band buckle became an opportunity for approaching things tabula rasa. During its two-year transmutation, Cully, bassist Claire Miskimmin and guitarist Philip Quinn had a single aim for their fourth album: to make an old-fashioned record clocking in around 30 to 35 minutes in length that made the listener reach straight for repeat. From the Bang Bang bar-summoning swoon of opener ‘25’ and the submerged disco doom of ‘Haus Proud’ to the rapt, dub-leaning ‘Fragments of a Portrait’, Girls Names have excelled in their goal by forging an LP of synchronous nuance and defiance.
Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire (“I want to bathe again, I want to swim again / In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold.” — ‘25’). But while Stains on Silence came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it’s both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn’t be more assured.
Tour dates June
15th – Blackbox, Belfast
19th – Moth Club, London
20th – Oporto, Leeds
21st – Old Hairdressers, Glasgow
22nd – Night People, Manchester
23rd – Whelans, Dublin
The Fat Angel Sings 