If you look at the figurative pages of music magazines across the year, one notion seems to rise to the top of the pile: we are not listening to music in the way we used to. Whether it is Adele ensuring her album is listened to throughout by having Spotify remove the shuffle option, the explosion of TikTok ‘audio’ sending songs flying to the top of the charts, or even the surge in vinyl purchases, it is plain to see that music is evolving.

One place this evolution is most prevalent is the cut and paste ethos that we’ve all adopted since the advent of downloading and streaming songs. No matter your preferred platform, there’s a good chance your interface is full to the brim with playlists, recommended radio options and a hefty dose of forgotten album filler in the trash. Far-flung from the LP-boom of the 1970s, now songs, are the only way to really gain some traction. Faroutmagazine

https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/san-francisco-indie-pop-list

Mt Misery – Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind) Sometime in the 80s, before I had really cemented my relationship with beer, cigarettes and fast food, I used to play football reasonably well. One Bank Holiday we travelled far up North to Hartlepool (Mt.Misery‘s home town) to play a game. Ultimately it was cancelled because of the springtime sleet and snow. We then spent the rest of the day drinking with locals dressed in shorts and T-shirts, who were clearly not phased by the inclement weather…they make ’em tough up there.

As such it feels a tad obtuse for this bunch of ‘hardened northerners’ to be toying with all that is fine, melodic and jangly about 60s west coast-pop and early 90s indie-pop, especially when they unite these aesthetics into an absolute thing of sunshine-pop beauty. Janglepophub

Massage – In Gray & Blue (Hacienda Version)

The Umbrellas – Galine Around since the early 1990s and critically acclaimed, many indie-kids could sucuumb to the habit of being dismissive of a label like Slumberland Records for not being small/cool/boutique/indie enough

Dismiss them at your peril though, as Slumberland Records have always managed to ensure that their ‘big indie heart’ beats with gusto, by continuing to display a total knack for unearthing and backing the very best in often jangly, left field talent.

San Francisco foursome, The Umbrellas have the potential to be their flagship act for some time to come if this debut is indicative, as they take all things C86 retro and augment it with various nuances of extra jangle.

Perfectly jangly, perfectly left field, this is an album that will undoubtedly be filling the ‘best ofs’ of the better blogs at the end of the year janglepophub

Sullen Eyes – Getting There This was what made indie pop so great to begin with back in its ‘80s infancy – guitar pop distilled down to its essentials and carried along by a sincere passion for melody fadeawayradiate

All bouncy, uptempo, jangly sweetness, imbued by vocals that you imagine being sung by a lovely lady, in a twee floral dress, with cool quirks dripping from every available pore janglepophub

Cindy – 1:2. We don’t always want the same thing from music. What we want, or need, depends on temperament, point in life, how the day or week is going and probably many other factors. Often we choose the music we need, but I think sometimes music finds us. 1:2, the new album by San Francisco’s Cindy is that kind of music for me. As is the case with most of the music here it found me via a message from the label. However, it found me on an internal level as well. I played the album and discovered that it was something that, quite viscerally, I’d been missing. The songs filled a psychological hole, satisfied an emotional need and, despite the almost claustrophobic scope of the themes, seemed to expand my life. I think I have played the album at least once a day for over two months whenyoumotoraway

Teenage Fanclub – I’m More Inclined Not everything happens by design – couples stumble into separations, states slide into war – and so it was with Gerry Love’s split from Teenage Fanclub in 2018. A disagreement about an upcoming tour resulted, without either party quite realising how, in Love’s departure, 29 years after joining the band…

Endless Arcade is thick with the spectre of loss. Not, however, for the absence of Love, but of love itself: after a decade in Ontario with his Canadian wife of more than 20 years, Blake is back in Scotland, situation uncertain.

Many of his six songs on Endless Arcade seem to deal with the aftermath of this trauma, the beauty of his melodies highlighting the sweet despair of the words, some of the most elegant and refined he’s written. “This life is complicated,” he muses on the beat-group rush of “I’m More Inclined”. “It’s enough to make you blue/And then you have the rug get pulled from under you… When I leave this great dominion/Roving far across the sea/Do you keep a candle burning there for me?”

The Telephone Numbers – Leviathan If you’re looking for a heartbreak best friend today or for the rest of the fall, it seems that The Telephone Numbers have you covered ravemsingstheblues

Self Esteem – I Do This All The Time Rebecca Lucy Taylor re-emerged under the experimental-pop guise of Self Esteem in 2017 after spending more than a decade as one-half of the indie-folk duo Slow Club…

Taylor explains in a statement. “I’m wonderful and I’m terrible. I hurt people and people hurt me. I feel everything and nothing. It’s a shit laugh but then it can be quite jolly can’t it.” … an uplifting reminder that all that matters in life is contentment, and comparing yourself to others is only going to end in tears. Faroutmagazine

Nation of Language – This Fractured Mind it’s five and a half minutes are overflowing with vibrant, colorful synths into which Ian Devaney’s hypnotic vocals blend perfectly. Read what he said about the song “After I dropped out of college I spent a number of years delivering pizzas and waiting tables while I lived at home and tried to get a music career going. One ends up spending a lot of time contending with unrealized dreams and feeling jealousy towards those who have moved on. There’s an inferiority complex that can set in, which if unchecked, can lead down a pretty bitter and self-destructive road. This is a song for driving down that road, as indecision and longing and regret cycle together into mania, until finally, at the end, quiet acceptance and peace wash over.” Stereogum

Pynch – Karaoke It’s easy to imagine two people in a car, not really communicating, while the big blue Californian sky stares back at them from outside…the main thrust of the song, which is about his and his partner’s inability to find a space in which they can reconnect, “I don’t understand this / It’s like you’re speaking in tongues.” Ultimately, he seems to accept that this might be an irredeemable situation, but the love is still present as he poignantly affirms “stay strong and don’t you waste it / we only get to go round once.” beats per minute

Pynch’s lyricism which appears so minimalistic is actually so cleverly constructed, it’s absolutely sublime. Turtletempo

Dummy – Punk Product #4 While they share a creative flourish with the more artistic edge of the alternative scene, what sets Dummy apart is the joy with which they make music. This is no po-faced experimentation, Dummy’s music is a euphoric blast of technicolour, reminiscent of the best moments of Animal Collective or The Beta Band. Fortherabbits

Chime School – Taking Time To Tell You If you’re a fan of chiming, jangly indiepop made by stripey-shirt-wearing musicians wielding 12-string Rickenbackers — from The Smiths to The Stone Roses to just about every band on Slumberland (Pains of Being Pure at Heart and The Aislers Set, to name two) — Chime School will scratch that winsome itch…. packs a lot of hooks and bah-bah-bah’s into its 2:42 running time brooklynvegan

Humdrum – Wave Goodbye if you don’t immediately feel yourself swooning, please have someone check on you. Austintownhall

FLTY BRGR GRL – Duet Hailing from Oslo… are influenced by, “60s vibes, crushes and burgers”. Beatrix dreamt up the band after being confronted by a particularly great, greasy burger on a trip to California, and recruited Sarah after the pair met at a summer camp and bonded over stories of unrequited love.

…Across Love You Forever’s nine tracks, FLTY BRGR GRL explore a series of crushes, from the giggle-inducing to the outright heartbreaking, the songs tied together by tenderness and the crazy obsession inducing power of love

…In FLTY BRGR GRL’s capable hands, youth and young romance sound as painful, difficult and entirely thrilling as ever, and for the generation living through it, they might just have found their perfect soundtrack fortherabbits

Bridge Dog – San Francisco a perfect mix of fuzzy dream-pop with some incredible vocals, shoegazy guitars, and a chorus that will get lodged deep within your brain. There is also a genuine emotional sentiment that feels totally and utterly sincere. Weallwantsomeone

Starry Eyed Cadet – Feathers a song about gun violence and how populist politicians use divisive rhetoric rather than solve the issue (s) at hand. The band have sadly been affected by gun violence and that comes over in the poignant words which sometimes seem out of place against the catchy percussion and guitars. Recordsilike

Janelane – Goodbye To Heartache she recounts sleepless nights “left lying awake, counting my mistakes” and the pain of knowing that your strong feelings for someone else just aren’t quite mutual. However, on “Goodbye To Heartache,” the focus shifts a bit towards mustering the will to plot a new course forward, with lyrics that capture how challenging, but necessary, that next step can be: “Try my best to say goodbye to heartache. Telling myself I’m okay with dancing alone.”

Musically, the song is about as catchy as anything I’ve heard all year, and in that way, it establishes a lively countering force to the lyrics lookatmyrecords

ME REX – Wandle

ME REX – Peckham Rye

ME REX – The Party Eating It’s Own Tail an audacious experiment: 52 short song snippets, all of them in a similar key and time signature so they can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song with no beginning or end. It’s a true Choose Your Own Adventure experience…available as a vinyl record sold with an optional deck of 52 cards, each representing a song, that can be drawn at random to determine a track order… When it works and the songs feed into each other just right, it’s exhilarating. pitchfork

Bleach Lab – Real Thing a plea for a meaningful connection, the slightly nostalgic tinge to the music adding to the lyrical thread of never giving up on love, despite the knocks we get and the walls we build along the way fortherabbits

TeenCanteen – Friends What should have been their debut album. Recorded after a handful of rehearsals over 2 weekends… the original version of Friends is equally heartmelting and spine tingling everythingflowsglasgow

Say Sue Me – So Tender their inimitable sense of ‘cool’. Now obviously I use the word ‘cool’ as I am old. My 15 year old son reliably informs that his whatisupp / toktik generation use words like ‘the shit’, ‘dope’ and ‘lit’, to describe something cool these days and who am I too argue?

I think Simon Cowell has often peered out of the top of trousers to mutter ‘x-factor’, when we do not really know why an act is so enthralling and whilst I find the term twee, it is so apt for Korea’s finest. Janglepophub

Emma Russack and Lachlan Denton – Authenticity I was all prepared for a really forlorn vibe to course through the whole of this… honestly, you get this intimate listen to Lachlan here, just working his voices over a really light strum. At :51 seconds, he’s joined by Emma, carefully, then letting a percussive element join them, giving the song just the faintest little bob and bounce. There’s this carefully ornate guitar line soloing after the 2 minute mark that’s absolutely charming, setting Denton up for this incredibly powerful wail that just crashes into you with such brutal force that I’m pretty sure a tear came to my eye austintownhall

The Head – French Girls A jangly rocker with a yearning charm obscuresound

Blvck Hippie – If You Feel Alone At Parties A self-styled Sad Boy Indie Rock Band from Tennessee, Blvck Hippie is the project of Josh Shaw. Setting out with the aim of, “tryna show Black Kids they can be weird too”, Josh’s music takes the sound of the indie rock he loves and fuses it with a creative spirit of always making something different, for which he credits the likes of Kanye West and Kid Cudi fortherabbits

Kids On A Crime Spree – When Can I See You Again? Back in 2011Kids on a Crime spree released a damn near perfect EP, a promise of sorts, that was followed by a few stray singles and splits, but then silence. Now the band charges into the new year with a debut album on Slumberland in tow… As their peers on Slumberland seem satisfied with the jangle, KOACS take their tack in a different direction, coating their cuddliness in a thick tangle of fuzz and froth ravensingstheblues

Pip Blom – It Should Have Been Fun about being gaslighted and losing faith in your partner. “What I thought you said and what you said I did / It isn’t adding up / It makes me feel so weird,” Pip sings. She is over the butterflies of nascent romance and wants something stable and rewarding, revealing her relationship woes with an archetypally Dutch matter-of-factness, as though we are hearing one side of a telephone conversation. Nothing is disguised popmatters

illuminati hotties – u v v p (the project of singer/songwriter Sarah Tudzin)… features Buck Meek from Big Thief

Tudzin had this to say about the new single in a press release: “The road toward fulfillment is lonesome and dusty for a rambling ranger like yourself. For when you need a deputy’s hand, a sling of something sweet, or just a breather in paradise, there’s ‘u v v p.’ I brought along my pal Buck Meek to remind you to say something about how special your beau may be to you, even if you’re too shy to muster up the courage.” Undertheradarmag

Big Thief – Change This humble track, accompanied by soft drums and gentle acoustic guitars, details the shifts, transitions, and contrasts that make up the movement of life. Adrianne Lenker sings softly about changes in the natural world—shifts in the air, the movement of water, the wrinkles and imperfections that appear on our skin—and then highlights the ultimate change: death. “Death like a door to a place we’ve never been before,” she offers thoughtfully… Big Thief have a knack for letting their music guide listeners into the uncertainty with a gentle hand. Floodmagazine

Karen Peris – I Would Sing Along Peris’s birdlike chirp has long been the ideal instrument to properly convey the fragility and wide-eyed innocence of childhood. That she’s gravitated towards producing a children’s album under her own name should then come as little surprise…

Peris’ voice is one that captures a very specific mood and tonality – one heavily steeped in wistful, often autumnal-sounding nostalgic melancholy – that could quite literally sing just about anything and still manage to tap into this well-established aesthetic

A Song Is Way Above the Lawn is obviously not for all children. But those more contemplative, introspective, imaginative little ones will find themselves at home and understood in the world of fantasy and play established by the soothing, impossibly delicate voice of Karen Peris. As a parent it feels like a gift to be cherished for years to come. Short and sweet – not even reaching the half hour mark – A Song Is Way Above the Lawn is beautiful, heartwarming and a joy to experience. Spectrumculture

Wolf Alice – Lipstick On The Glass lushly orchestrated, yet it seethes with infidelity and betrayal. As the dizzying verses navigate romantic confusion and what it means to restart a relationship with a disloyal lover, the guitars prickle with horror and disgust, while Rowsell delivers her strongest vocal to date, scaling operatic highs during the rousing pre-chorus. It’s a deliberately uncomfortable listen: a song that surges forward into the darkness like a flood in the night. Nme

Parquet Courts – Walking At A Downtown Pace – opens with A Savage deadpanning, “I’m making plans for the day all of this is through.” It’s a familiar pandemic-era sentiment, and a few breaths later Savage is looking forward to the moment he’ll “return the smile on an unmasked friend.” But the Brooklyn band’s upcoming album Sympathy for Life was already basically in the can when COVID-19 hit. The first widely available single from that record offers a breathless escape from the lockdowns we lived in before lockdowns were mandated; they may have been self-imposed, but they were no less socially distanced. Sooner or later, you have to break out, and when you do, the trampled tourists will never know what hit them. pitchfork

Helen Love – This Is My World Their forthcoming 10th full-length follows on from the band’s ninth studio album, Power On, released mid-pandemic in 2020. Spending lockdown digging through her record collection and rediscovering her zest for the bands of her youth, with the punchy hits of Power On, Love firmly reignited her passion for punk, and it showed loudly, proudly and snottily on each and every staccato, pogo-inducing hit.

This Is My World sees the scales tip in the other direction… revealing a rare introspective and reflective side of her songwriting that looks towards the future and examines the inexorable march of time that eventually comes to all young punk rockers…even Sheena.

“Getting older, life changes,” says Love, philosophically. “Children grow up and leave home, loved ones pass away, friends move on. It’s easier to look back and harder to push forward…it’s not all Bubblegum punk rock DISCO around my house any more, but in truth, of course, it never was…” originalrock

SUEP – Domesticated Dream just pure joy; it feels like we can finally stop for a moment and not take our lives so serious; it’s freeing in that sense… You’ll find it kind of funky, you’ll find yourself gently swinging your hips and grinning, Austintownhall

The Boys With The Perpetual Nervousness – Rose Tinted Glass the band are something of an atypical endeavour. The band’s two members – Gonzalo Marcos (from Spanish indie popsters El Palacio de Linares) and Andrew Taylor (from Scottish group Dropkick) – live in seperate countries. The band were basically socially distancing before it became all the rage. Songs From Another Country was recorded in two parts, in seperate studios, in seperate cities and countries theaureview Just imagine Teenage Fanclub peeling off their masks Scooby Doo style to reveal an even poppier version of themselves; this is what you get back austintownhall

Rural France – Hosepipe Ban the ingredients they use are the most common tags we apply to music we love and cover on this blog: Indie rock; Guitar pop; and jangle pop. And the influences high in our pantheon of heroes — Guided By Voices, Teenage Fanclub, The Feelies. and a good dose of California guitar pop with a bit of country dust. Quality ingredients and influences alone don’t guarantee good music, but Rural France clearly add the pop smarts, heart, humor and love of making music that result in RF being one of our top albums of the season. Whenyoumotoraway

The War On Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore a song that will make you long to be back in a concrete arena filled with 20,000 new friends, singing together in a way that makes you think, if only for a moment, that humanity might not be swirling toward total catastrophe. You can feel the stick on the soles of your feet just by listening to this thing. You can smell the frankfurters. It’s the type of anthem that makes one of those $18 Budweisers in a commemorative plastic cup seem like a damn bargain—a small price to pay to briefly heighten some sense of communion after a year and a half of pandemic seclusion. Pitchfork

Torres – Thirstier a hymn to still desiring your partner after the new relationship energy has simmered down clashmusic

Torrey – Screens an anthem of social-media-induced anxiety, that builds around an urgent guitar line and the repeated refrain, “screens say you’re alright, but are you?” Fortherabbits

these tracks just feels so very right for these for these ‘glass half full, but the glass looks a bit fragile’, times we are experiencing. Janglepophub

Maria Kelly – The Sum Of The In-Between acts as an open diary entry from Kelly, where she explores anxiety, pressure and loneliness; but also, hope, perseverance and steadfastness. The album is peppered with short, softly spoken word interludes: voicemails left from friends, and soul bearing confessions from Kelly herself. These doors left ajar invite the listener to consider the artist’s most personal reflections, creating an indelible bond between both parties in the process. The spoken word tracks make the album into a play: chaptering Kelly’s evolving feelings into different scenes. In this respect, Kelly’s debut works as music, but also as theatre. Considering ‘the sum of the in-between’ is Kelly’s first album, the effect created is all the more impressive. Clashmusic

David Christian & The Pinecone Orchestra – The Ballad Of The Button-Downs After 29 years with British indie/garage/beat/punk/psych-pop collective Comet Gain, singer/mastermind and main fireraiser David Christian thought, “Why not do a solo album?“

David escaped to the French woods by the ocean when Boris and his rabid disgusting crew weren’t looking… Then later, the group of friends known as The Pinecone Orchestra… colored everything in with guitars, vocals, bass, pedal steel etc. Part of the weird process of looking back or trying to diary a life full of holes is that it’s best managed through friends, places, records. But mainly the people you knew — good or bad — those fleeting best friends forevers whose faces you now struggle to recall, the crushes that crushed you until you wonder “well i wonder how their life turned out.” Acoustic guitars, pianos, pedal steels, harmonies, wonderful drumming… There are alcoholic skinheads, forest hermits, Californian dudes, Holloway sweethearts, bruised mods in the upstairs room, strange boys being hit by a car, painters who can’t paint no more, friends and ghosts and lovers and losers. Forcedexposure

The Photocopies – Just Shut Your Mouth short bursts of lo-fi C86 inspired tweepop recordsilike

Salt Lake Alley – Merry-Go-Round From the moment you press play the guitars skate and shimmy, sort of skirting around you speakers as the beat bounces lightly in the background… Oh, and please please hang out just pass the 1:37 mark as there’s one hell of a guitar solo just waiting to make you swoon over the hooks

Low Nearly three decades into their career, and on their 13th album, Low are making their strangest, strongest, and most fearless music to date… Sparhawk and Parker’s gorgeous harmonies pierce through a vertiginous landscape of glitches and static that may make you wonder if your speakers are imploding while you listen. pitchfork

R.E.M. – Be Mine (Mike On A Bus Version) written and recorded on a tour bus in the middle of the night, and the original recording is included on the bonus disc of the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M’s 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. While the version on the record ended up being a full-band studio recreation, it’s the bus recording that channels the half-asleep, delayed awareness of time and reality brought on by a long drive through nowhere. You can hear it in the quietness of Stipe’s vocal, singing as if he’s trying not to wake anybody up, accompanied only by Buck’s guitar, the drone of an organ, and the sounds of the bus moving through a world turned upside-down and emptied of people. Pitchfork

The Tubs – Illusion tears open self-delusion for a bout of coming to terms with the lies we tell ourselves ravensingstheblues

Motorists – Vainglorious finds the band confronting how the people in charge are always willing to say the right things in front of an audience but their actions never seem to match up to these promised spectralnights

Courtney Barnett – Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To she asks, “We did our best, but what does that really mean?” It’s a good question, especially in a song that was born of a conversation Barnett had with a friend in the throes of pandemic-era pessimism. The idea of writing a list of things to look forward to is so deeply and truly relatable. We aren’t collectively entirely out of the woods, but we have certainly turned a corner — haven’t we? Consequenceofsound

The Ashenden Papers – Summer’s Coming On Back in 2011, Jason Dezember used this The Ashenden Papers project as a vehicle to get all of his most precious bedroom pop leanings out into the world. The result was a brilliant self-titled debut… Then that was it. Or at least we thought it was, until suddenly, 8 years later, he released the Melodie Robin single (Dec 2019) and the quite superb (and long delayed) second album, Asphodel Meadows album (May 2020). Both effectively confirmed a) the project’s brilliance and b) the hiatus was far too long.

Thankfully Dezember has more concerted plans for this project, with this Summer single being the first of what his Facebook page decrees ‘four upcoming singles’ and indeed one that gives us every reason to assume this could be quite a special collection. janglepophub

Falconet – I’m With You it is testament to the absolute quality of this duo that there is not one track that is not simply engulfed by a sense of enchanting janglepophub

Colatura – The Met A quote from the band about ‘The Met’: “You ever have one of those “take yourself on a date” solo days that’s supposed to be empowering – a big middle finger to the dating world – but turns into something altogether the opposite? It’s a beautiful day, you’re alone walking the halls of the Met museum, taking in culture, searching for inspiration, but with no one by your side to share it with you struggle to find the beauty in any of the art and instead get lost in your own head.

“’The Met’ is also about coming to terms with the fact that so many of the romantic expectations we are fed are unrealistic. We expect the perfect partner to just appear out of thin air and effortlessly break the patterns we’ve always fallen into about dating, but in reality we almost always end up in the same place, wondering why nothing ever changes.

Tallies – No Dreams of Fayres As ethereal as it is liberating, the song is sound of quietly understated triumph. Godisinthetvzine

Stephen Fretwell – The Goshawk And The Gull Over a decade after his second album Man On The Roof and with an internet hashtag asking the question “where’s Fretwell”, the mystery about his whereabouts has finally been resolved with the return of one of the country’s finest singer-songwriters from his own self-imposed exile… Fretwell left music to become a full-time Dad on the South Coast, turning back on the music business that demanded more of the likes of Run, the single that ended up bookending Gavin And Stacey and which showed his potential reach… Freed of the major label pressure to write hit singles, it is a very simple record wracked with fragility and vulnerability. It is a response to the world around him falling apart during the process of crafting it. The silence and spaces in the songs often have as much impact as the guitars and the words in creating the effect that you’ve been let into the most private thoughts, emotions and fears of its creator. Louderthanwar

Clairo – Blouse the little thrills of adolescence are gone. “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down the blouse?” she sings, the dewy sincerity she once radiated now hardened into bitterness. Here is another young woman whose trust has been abused by an older man, and who is so hungry to be validated that she’ll risk being sexualized again: “If touch could make them hear, then touch me now.”

It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency. Pitchfork

Grazer – Vision Melbourne duo Grazer…consisting of Mollie and Matt, with backgrounds in painting, photography and poetry, Grazer has a dream pop/shoegaze veneer over a pure pop core: dappling, bubbling instruments and ethereal vocals that float over the surface. According to the band, ‘Vision’ is the naive foresight of where you want a relationship to go. It recalls our early romance in London, optimistic and innocent. Backseatmafia

Cate Le Bon – Moderation a pop song that sounds like it’s melting itself down, perhaps trying to turn itself into circa-1980 post-punk in the process. Le Bon says that the song is “a nod to the daily dilemma of trying to curb inherited and novel habits, when you want to eat the moon, and an essay written by the architect Lina Bo Bardi in 1958 that continues to kick hard.” Stereogum

Semi Trucks – Where There’s No Ceiling unlikely to be the best seller that Meritorio Records ever release. However, if they cared about that sort of thing they would not have released it, lets hope they remain comfortble among such shining weirdness ! Janglepophub

Cold Beat – Mandlebrot Fall it definitely feels like a futuristic video game…not that I mind that at all. But, that’s merely the canvas for the song, as the band paint contrasting moods atop, sort of blossoming in this dreamy industrial fashion, dulling the bright beats beneath to create this, dare I say, cold beat austintownhall

Drug Store Romeos – Frame of Reference Built on budget, eBay-bought Casio keyboards (the kind once marketed for school music rooms and high-street shoppers rather than synth connoisseurs), ‘The World Within Our Bedrooms’ emits a hazy sound that befits the band’s sleepy-eyed nature. But even beyond these primitive keyboards that blanket the whole album – imposter snare beats, head-melting synth drones and automated arpeggio sequencers included – there’s a wealth of sublimity to be found. Nme

Swansea Sound – I Sold My Soul on eBay an unambiguous rant against the cynical profiteering of online music platforms. After selling his soul on eBay, YouTube and Spotify, Williams reassures himself with the fact that he’s earned a hefty, “0.000000000000001p”. The track rattles along with frantic guitars and indiepop spirit as Fletcher yelps for someone to get a doctor. It’s an absolute riot! Louderthanwar