News
Bonnie “Prince” Billy performs “They Keep Trying to Find You” on Later… with Jools Holland — a powerful airing of the lead single from “We Are Together Again”. The song confronts the temptation to bury your head in the sand as outside pressures mount, Will Oldham pitting the darkness within against the darkness without. Watch his unforgettable performance now.
Styrofoam Winos share “Somebody Wants to Send You a Message,” the final single before their new album “Any River.” Joe Kenkel wrote the upbeat choogle after a bot’s “somebody wants to send you a message” notification herded him into a group chat. It’s capped by a face-melting bass clarinet solo from Jim Marlowe, the only non-Wino to play on the record.
Two Runner announce their second album, “PORCHLIGHT”, out August 28th via Gar Hole Records, and share new single and video “Strawberry Rhinestone”. Paige Anderson marks a transitional collection — goodbyes to a longtime musical partner and a decade-long relationship — though the songs stay warm and steady, resolute and tender-hearted, with the earnestness that has earned Two Runner years of praise.
Carson McHone shares a video for “The Canvas” and announces her first UK and European headline dates since “Pentimento”, her acclaimed third album. Crossing the Atlantic in August and September, she builds a band with Hollow Hand’s Max Kinghorn-Mills, plays three performances as a trio with Kinghorn-Mills and multi-disciplinary artist Fliss Horrocks, and takes in a slot at End of the Road Festival.
Belfast’s Alana Henderson swaps her signature cello for tenor guitar on new single “Appetite”, turning inward with striking clarity. The song traces the confusion of misreading your own appetite, its restless writing moving between wit and self-reproach while a faint country inflection and pedal steel shimmer lend a bittersweet lift — intimate, intelligent and emotionally precise. Watch the accompanying video, a silent-movie-inspired black-and-white film with a Wes-Anderson-gone-goth sensibility.
Alex Dupree returns on August 14th with “Talking to the Dog,” his first album since 2022’s “Thieves,” released via Oklahoma’s Scissor Tail Records. Produced by Michael Krassner and featuring Jolie Holland, it’s the work of a poet-songwriter taking Hank Williams’s offhand line somewhere stranger and more visionary. Ahead of it, he shares lead track “New Meaning.”
Luluc share “No One Else’s Pen”, the second single from their sixth album “Sweet Thief”, out 10th July on Community Music. Steve Hassett calls it a big old love song and a paean to living and loving with integrity, gratitude and presence of mind, set to a video built around printmaker Fleur Rendell’s artwork.
Shearwater share “Slugs In The Marigolds”, the third single from “The New World”, and it’s a side of the band we’ve not heard before: slinky and carefree. Beginning mid-stride, as if caught playing in an empty warehouse, it lets Doug Wieselman’s casually beautiful saxophone summon the ghost of Roxy Music, the loose, sunny feeling playing against a darker lyric.
Chicago trio Black Duck and Basque musician Elena Setién announce their self-titled debut, Black Duck With Elena Setién, out August 28th via Thrill Jockey. Born from a run of improvised Spanish shows and recorded fast in Chicago, the album lands with lead single “Land of the Many Eyes” — four players conversing at the boundaries of improvisation and composition.
Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and producer Mike Simonetti have shared their cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness,” from the collaborative EP, out 12th June via Smugglers Way. The accompanying video, starring Taylor and David Bredin with Jarvis Cocker and Sian Ahern, plays like a televised Samuel Beckett play.
Elanor Moss announces her debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” out August 21st on Merge Records, and shares the single and video “Sarah Waiting in the Car.” Across nine songs, Moss renders joy and pain in exquisite peals of psych-folk, her darkly-dreamed vignettes offering an understanding of healing as a process, rather than an object one obtains. This album is sure to be on many End-of-year lists.