News
Bring Your Own Hammer returns with two new singles, giving voice to figures the archive left in the margins. “The Cruel Father,” from Lavinia Blackwall and Neil Farrell with SJ McArdle, draws on an 1860s ballad about a father who abandoned his infant son. “The Girl from Spark’s Lake,” sung by Sophie Coyle, follows a runaway chasing bluebells.
Nora Stanley has spent years as a saxophonist and improviser on records by Cassandra Jenkins, The New Pornographers and Beth Orton. Now she steps out front. Her solo debut “Glass,” out July 31st via Worm Records and co-produced with Nate Mendelsohn, arrives with lead single “Noble Gas”, with Wendy Eisenberg calling her songs ‘subtly devastating.’
Memorial, the Brighton duo of Jack Watts and Oliver Spalding, share “Rest (& be thankful)”, their second release for Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community, featuring Irish singer-songwriter Niamh Regan. Named after a Scottish valley and written in half an hour, it holds a steady, driving rhythm while layered harmonies build toward a release carried by Ben Bishop’s guitar and lifted by Regan’s voice.
Darren Hayman reissues “The Violence,” the double album he calls the most ambitious work of his thirty-year career. First released in 2012 and recorded with his sixteen-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it closes his Essex Trilogy with songs about the 17th-century East Anglian witch trials and the English Civil Wars, now expanded with previously unreleased tracks and demos.
Horse Feathers reissue their long out-of-print debut, “Words Are Dead”, on August 28th via Kill Rock Stars. Recorded in Portland in 2006 by the duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick, the album returns fully remastered, on exclusive vinyl, with a replica of the original six-song demo CD. Hear “Finch on Saturday”, the first thing the band ever committed to tape.
Prison pull up with their third album, “Big Rigs on the BQE”, out July 31st, a long way from last year’s “Downstate”. They’ve shared lead cut “Sunrise Highway” with a scorching single edit video from Johnny Celentano and Cliff Elor — a fast, garage-bred psych charge built live from guitars, bass, drums, fuzz organ and vocals. Two side-long trips, tracked overlooking the highway.
A major archival release celebrates Martin Carthy MBE. “Along The Road Forever: Live At The BBC (1965-2022)” collects 328 recordings — 22½ hours across 20 CDs, spanning his solo work, his duo with Dave Swarbrick, with his daughter, Eliza Carthy, as well as Steeleye Span, Brass Monkey, The Watersons and Waterson:Carthy. It includes an 80-page book with a new Clinton Heylin essay.
Mama’s Broke announce their new album “Reunion,” out August 28th via Free Dirt Records and Forward Music Group, and share the 16mm video for the single “The Nameless.” Following the JUNO-nominated Narrow Line, the Nova Scotian duo hold a mirror to a fracturing world of broken communities and systems that no longer deliver. We trace the announcement through our archive.
LA quintet SML announce “Spontaneous Music Live,” out June 26th on International Anthem. After two studio albums collaged from live fragments, the band strip the editing away: two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded to analog tape during their December residency at Zebulon. Lead piece “Roundabouts,” the 24-minute B-side, is streaming now — SML in the room, fully in the moment.