Chloe Foy is a Singer/Songwriter from Gloucestershire, UK.
It was back in 2013 that Chloe Foy first began to turn heads with the release of her debut single, In The Middle of The Night. Now, some eight years later, the Gloucestershire-via-Manchester songwriter is gearing up for the release of her debut album, “Where Shall We Begin”. If any album meets the definition of long-awaited, it would be this one. Recorded at Pinhole Studios in Manchester, the album saw Chloe bring a host of musical collaborators into the studio.
For Chloe, the record is the result of a decade of hard graft, gradually shaping her ideas and influences into the tracks that make up this most remarkable of debut albums.
Excited to announce a brand new EP is coming . I chose some of my favourite tunes and made ‘Covers, Vol. 1’ over lockdown, including songs by The Cure, Whitney, Nick Cave and the Velvet Underground plus a little something unexpected at the end..
Callous Copper · Chloe Foy Callous Copper ℗ 2020 AntiFragile Music Released on: 2020-01-17
Performers: Chloe Foy – Vocals, Piano, Guitar Harry Fausing Smith – Strings, Guitars, Keys, Synths, Organ, Percussion and Backing Vocals Benjamin Nash – Synth, Backing Vocals
The long awaited debut album from Chloe Foy. Released December 2020
Following on from the release of Nottingham based metalcore band Palm Reader’s fourth album Sleepless, comes new single “False Thirst” which is their anthem for those overcoming adversity; “This song is about the normality behind life’s difficulties. We all find it hard in some respect. So, considering the thought of all our collective hardships, ‘should it be easy?’ That was the question I found myself asking whilst writing and it really helped me, even before it was answered, to gain some perspective. Realising you’re not alone in your troubles can really help to relieve the pressure we put on ourselves and reduce the stress surrounding those moments. In short, life is really fucking hard sometimes, but it goes on and it gets better.”
What an album… this is just an emotional roller-coaster. A distinctive thematic work, divided really in two halves. The first is harder and more direct in its intensity. But the astounding second half, beginning with the instrumental “Islay”, is a twisted slow burn. The lyrics more obscure and hidden; the pace slowing down with off-kilter rhythms building into a pulsing and massive (w)hole.
Taken from the album ‘Sleepless’, available to order on LP/CD/DD now:
Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. Endless Arcade follows the band’s ninth album Here, released in 2016. It’s quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heart warming and heart aching; guitars chime and distort; keyboard lines mesh and spiral; harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day.
“Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. The new record is quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heart warming and heart-aching; guitars chime and distort; keyboard lines mesh and spiral; harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day. Such is life. But the title track suggests: Don’t be afraid of this endless arcade that is life. “I think of an endless arcade as a city that you can wander through, with a sense of mystery, an imaginary one that goes on forever,” says Raymond McGinley, one half of the band’s songwriters for this album alongside Norman Blake. “When it came to choosing an album title, it seemed to have something for this collection of songs.”
Teenage Fanclub will release their anticipated new album “Endless Arcade” on April 30th and they’ve just shared a fourth song from it. Penned and sung by Norman Blake,“The Sun Won’t Shine On Me” is one of the Fannies’ most gentle songs ever, a pretty waltz-time folk ballad. “With a troubled mind, I am in decline,” Norman laments as the band’s signature harmonies cascade overtop.
Endless Arcade is Teenage Fanclub’s first album since Gerard Love left the group and it will be their 11th album overall. The band will play a few late summer festivals this year but save touring for the album for next year, with spring 2022 UK dates announced.
From the forthcoming album Endless Arcade released Apr 30th 2021 on PeMa and Merge Records .
Chubby and the Gang are a West London punk troupe comprised of members of various bands associated with The New Wave ofBritish Hardcore, among them Violent Reaction, Abolition, Big Cheese and more. The band – helmed by local electrician Charlie Manning – developed a cult following in the UK, largely rooted in the cross-pollinating nature of the punk scene.
Knock, knock – they’re back. “Lightning Don’t Strike Twice” is a three-minute ride through the band’s entire mood board – opening with lap slide noodling before steering into anthemic pub rock with snarling lyrics. The video was directed by Jasper Cable-Alexander, and takes inspiration from ’90s internet cafés. “Lightning Don’t Strike Twice” is part of a double A-side 7″ out on May 28th that will feature another new track entitled “Life’s Lemons.”
Lead singer Chubby Charles offers: “I wrote this song about social inequality. Not mine but the people I saw around me. I feel like the whole premise of poverty is presented like this game in which if you play your cards right you can escape. In reality it’s more like playing a game of dice when they’re loaded against your favour. Constantly being struck by lightning and being told that it will never happen again. I remember witnessing someone’s telephone voice where they had to change their voice when conducting business or applying for jobs so they don’t come across as if they are from a lower class.
I wrote the last verse about that because it disgusted me that in a system supposedly created on meritocracy a human being has to change their identity to try and shake unemployment. I’ve had very few jobs that required me to go for an interview. No one really cares who you are when you drive a minicab or lay out cables so I’m lucky in that sense. But many people aren’t.”
This double A-side 7″ contains “Lightning Don’t Strike Twice” (available as an instant download when pre-ordered) and “Life’s Lemons” – released 28th May 2021.
It has been eleven years since Cathal Coughlan committed his voice to record – and the moment you hear it, you will be painfully aware of how much you have missed it. He has a voice like no-one else, expressive and sullen while somehow not coming across as grumpy. Originally from Cork, Ireland, Cathal Coughlan is the co-founder and singer of acclaimed 80s/90s groups Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, and widely considered to be one of Ireland’s most revered singer/songwriters, beloved by fans of caustic literate lyricism and erudite songcraft.
Although I still prefer his work in Microdisney together with Sean O’Hagan to his Fatima Mansions and solo records, the new album is certainly the best thing he has made since those days.
Maybe the renewed inspiration is related to the fact that Coughlan was instrumental in reforming Microdisney for a number of concerts, Not only do some of his old mates appear on this record; the songs are great, there is lots of drama in the arrangements, and the intense lyrics are filled to the brim with chaotic pictures expressing the life of alter-ego Co-Aklan.
The high point on the album is probably ‘The Knockout Artist’, what a pop song! It is also great to hear Sean O’Hagan contributing some synth on it. O’Hagan reappears on the closing track ‘Unrealtime’, this time on vocals.
A real keeper.
Recorded in London, the album features contributions from members of long-time collaborators the Grand Necropolitan Quartet as well as Luke Haines (The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder), Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney, The High Llamas), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti), Eileen Gogan and Aindrais O’Gruama (Fatima Mansions).
I was never a fan of East India Youth although that was William Doyle in everything but name. However, his first proper solo album ‘Your Wilderness Revisited’ totally and absolutely floored me, Whereas that was a perfectionist album in every sense, William Doyle is now back with something quite different.
His hard disc crashed and he then had to piece together the album based on cassette copies that he had made. Or at least that is how the story goes, because who really backs their recordings up on cassette these days? Whatever the truth is, these songs are definitely more spontaneous, and definitely represent something that is a bit muddier timewise. Initially, you don’t notice, as the two opening tracks are crisp and pretty great pop songs. But then you are thrown into something that sounds more like a collage. There are more good pop songs further into the album but there are interspersed with more experimental – or maybe I should rather say unfocused – pieces.
Apart from the track ‘Semi-bionic’, which literally starts out sounding like a hard disc crashing, the sound quality on the album isn’t muddy or full of tape hiss, but you definitely get the feel that some of tracks aren’t still finished. While that does lend the album an air of spontaneity, it also makes for a somewhat stumbling listening experience. But when it clicks, it is clear that Doyle’s sense for melody combined with ambient drama is intact!
It’s nearly a decade since William Doyle handed a CD-R demo to the Quietus co-founder John Doran at a gig, who loved it so much he set up a label to release Doyle’s debut EP (as East India Youth). Doyle’s debut album, “Total Strife Forever”, followed in 2014, as did a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. A year later, he was signed to XL, touring the world and about to release his second album – all by the age of 25.After self-releasing four ambient and instrumental albums, Doyle’s third full-length record – and the first under his own name – “Your Wilderness Revisited” arrived to ecstatic reviews in 2019: Described it as “a dazzlingly beautiful triumph of intention” and Metro declared it an album not only of the year, but “of the century”. Just over a year later, as he turns 30, Doyle is back with Great Spans of Muddy Time.
Born from accident but driven forward by instinct, Great Spans was built from the remnants of a catastrophic hard-drive failure. With his work saved only to cassette tape, Doyle was forced to accept the recordings as they were – a sharp departure from his process on Your Wilderness Revisited, which took four long years to craft toward perfection. “Instead of feeling a loss that I could no longer craft these pieces into flawless ‘Works of Art’, I felt intensely liberated that they had been set free from my ceaseless tinkering,” Doyle says.“The album this turned out to be – and that I’ve wanted to make for ages – is a kind of Englishman-gone-mad, scrambling around the verdancy of the country’s pastures looking for some sense,” says Doyle. “It has its seeds in Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Robyn Hitchcock, and Syd Barrett.”
Doyle credits Bowie’s ever-influential Berlin trilogy, but also highlights a much less expected muse: Monty Don, presenter of the BBC programme Gardener’s World, Doyle’s lockdown addiction. “I became obsessed with Monty Don. I like his manner and there’s something about him I relate to. He once described periods of depression in his life as consisting of ‘nothing but great spans of muddy time’.
When I read that quote I knew it would be the title of this record,” Doyle says. “Something about the sludgy mulch of the album’s darker moments, and its feel of perpetual autumnal evening, seemed to fit so well with those words. I would also be lying if I said it didn’t chime with my mental health experiences as well. ”Lead single “And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)” is representative of the album as a whole: eclectic and unpredictable, but also playful and properly danceable. On top of the gently pulsing electronics, soothing harmonies and glowing melodies, there’s a ripping guitar solo that ricochets around the song like a pinball. “I wanted to get back into the craft of writing individual songs rather than being concerned with overarching concepts,” Doyle says. Elsewhere there’s the synth pop strut of “Nothing At All”, pulsating static on “Semi-Bionic”, incandescent synths and enveloping soundscapes in “Who Cares”, and the ambient glitch groove of “New Uncertainties”. Great Spans of Muddy Time is a beautiful ode to the power of accident, instinct and intuition. The result, however, is far from an anomaly: this celebration of the imperfect album is one that required years of honed craft and dedicated focus to achieve, “For the first time in my career, the distance between what I hear and what the listener hears is paper-thin,” Doyle says. “Perhaps therein reveals a deeper truth that the perfectionist brain can often dissolve.”
Ed’s first album came out in 2017 on Lost Map Records. His music has regularly appeared on BBC6 Music and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, which included The Uncle Sold in their Top 12 albums of 2017. His 2nd album, “The Obvious I” is out now on Needle Mythology.
It has been four years since Ed Dowie’s debut album ‘The Uncle Sold’. I liked that very much and although maybe his new album is a little less experimental, I like it every bit as much. With arrangements very much designed to lift Ed’s strong voice to the fore, it plays like a synth pop album for those of us who never liked synth pop albums. It is all here, sampled instruments, blips and blurbs, programmed drums and more. But done with restraint and a sense for the rather straightforward songs on the album. In 2017, Ed released his feted debut album ‘The Uncle Sold’, prompting The Quietus to hail him as a “bold and starry-eyed visionary” and The Skinny to praise his “beautiful… stolen snapshots of glimpsed futures and lost pasts.” and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction made the record one of their albums of the year. Now, four years on, Ed is to return with an album that will surely find him new followers alongside long time fans such as Lauren Laverne, who described its predecessor as an “absolutely extraordinary” achievement.
And while there are many layered sounds here, they never unnecessarily take over the soundstage, allowing for much space between instruments, sometimes even creating a cavernous yet simultaneously clear sound for the vocals to inhabit.
So whereas there are clear homages to the sounds of the 80s here, and the 8-bit cover art had me worried, Dowie has delivered a powerful album of gentle pop that really shines.
‘The Obvious I’, the second album from Ed Dowie, is the second new master release from Needle Mythology, the label founded by music writer, author and broadcaster Pete Paphides. “The Obvious I” was co produced by pioneering British experimental musician and sometime member of Polar Bear “Leafcutter John” Burton “John’s become something of a hero of mine over the years. Way back when he was in Polar Bear, I approached him after a couple of gigs, and he’d remembered me from those days. And really, his presence on the record was invaluable. He lent me equipment and gave me advice, then when I finished recording, I sent him the stems and he mixed the album.”
Treading the line between Pixies, Hole, and a particular guitar pop je ne sais quoi, Du Blonde’s fourth album is a punchy splash of acerbic melodic colour. written, recorded and produced by Du Blonde (aka Beth Jeans Houghton), ‘Homecoming’ is a refreshing taste of pop-grunge finery, featuring guests including Shirley Manson, Ezra Furman, Ride’s Andy Bell (ride/oasis), the Farting Suffragettes, and members of Girl Ray and Tunng among others. the album began as a few songs hashed out on a porch in la in early 2020, as Houghton’s desire to create something self-made and self-released merged with the then incoming pandemic.
Fans of Du Blonde’s previous two studio albums (2015’s ‘Welcome Back to Milk’ and 2019’s ‘Lung Bread for Daddy’) might be surprised to find that ‘Homecoming’ takes on the form of a pop record. the garage rock, grunge and metal guitar licks that have come to define Du Blonde are still there in spades, but as a whole the direction of the album is pop through and through. Houghton’s freak flag is still flying high however, a fact that’s no more apparent than on ‘Smoking Me Out’, a bizarre mash up of 80’s shock rock, metal and 60’s pop group harmonies. this defiant and energetic attitude can be heard throughout ‘Homecoming’, whether writing about her medication (30mg of citalopram, once a day), her queerness on ‘i can’t help you there’ (“I’ve been a queen, I’ve been a king, and still I don’t fit in”), to the joyous and manic explosion of ‘Pull The Plug’ (“say that I’m deranged, but I’ve been feeling more myself than ever”), Houghton is nothing if not herself, full force and unapologetic in her approach to writing, playing and recording her music.
Due for release in April 2021, ‘Homecoming’ is the first record to be engineered, produced and self released by Du Blonde. Written and recorded over several sessions between Los Angeles, London and Newcastle, ‘Homecoming’ is a no holds barred collection of Garage, Glam and hard rock finery, featuring a couple of tear-your-hair-out slow saddies for good measure.
‘Bad Time’ is the new EP from Peeping Drexels. The London based 5-piece, who have been together since they were sixteen, have to date released a series of singles on the Permanent Creeps and Fierce Panda labels. This is their first release on BY Records. They’ve previously received support from the likes of Steve Lamacq, DIY, So Young among others, performing live with the likes of Shame, Goat Girl and Public Practice.
Baby Blue 12″ Vinyl limited to 500 copies worldwide
Having all lived in London for most of their lives, the band are now just a ‘stone’s throw’ from each other, with daily walks to maintain contact and the occasional shout from a balcony. The friendships dating back to college led to open conversations about playing together, and when the drummer leaving Alex’s previous band timed well with the group moving nearer to each other, Margot was formed. ‘We kind of talked about playing together. Rob and I had done some stuff together so it kinda made sense’, explained Alex. ‘I especially admired Alex’s songwriting, the way he was writing lyrics and singing in his band… so I thought that would have been fun to work with him’, Ben added. The quiet respect that they have for each other and their craft was evident throughout our conversation as they gently jibed each other with affectionate, dry humour and sarcasm.
It’s about a mate. It’s certainly a tragedy. He’s had a hardship of sorts. He’s got a life to look forward, for sure, and so do all of us, but things external, out of his control, took over. He had started to rebuild, to see beyond the internal damp colours, he had a life back. And after losing the comfort of the person he loved, and after coming to terms with all of the pain and the rubble, all the regret, he had a pandemic. Lost job, no soulmate and back living with his family at 27.
He dreamed of an ideal life; he dreamt that he could change his circumstances, he fought against a raging brute that cared little for his dreams, for his determination. He just had to sit and wait, sit and wait, and be still with his ambitions. It’s about fear, loss, uncertainty, pain, hope and then the recoiling turgid desire for familiarity.
With all of the band members taking influence from various genres of music, the ‘music that [they] bonded around was American indie bands, like Real Estate, and Gear Hunter. That kind of 2010 guitar,’ Ben explained. ‘We all have very eclectic tastes you know,’ Mike continued. ‘I love jazz, and hip hop, and then I love indie music, even though that’s such a broad genre. Khurangbin and Andy Shauf, to shout out a few names!’
The vinyl release for Falling in Between Days and Walk With Me is one to look forward to on 19th February
With a stream of singles released in their first two years as a band, followed by the release of Margotzeko at the beginning of early 2020, Margot have continued to be ‘on it’, despite the difficult times.
Writers – Rob Fenner and Alex Hannaway with Alby Cleghorn, Ben Andrewes, Michael Webb
The Fat Angel Sings 