Jeremy Blackmore

Freelance journalist | Editor | Copywriter | Public relations

Music journalist

Music is my passion. I contribute to a number of magazines, interviewing artists, reviewing new releases and looking back over key moments in musical history, including exploring the origins of electronic music. Anything involving the Beatles will always spark my interest, but I have an eclectic taste and cover most genres and eras.

I'm always open to commissions for music writing. If I can help, please get in touch.

Stereoboard.com •

The Rolling Stones - Foreign Tongues (Album Review) - Stereoboard

The Rolling Stones’ late-career renaissance continues with ‘Foreign Tongues’, which draws heavily on the sound of classic albums ‘Some Girls’ and ‘Emotional Rescue’. Driven for the most part by rhythm, groove and feel, it is undoubtedly their best and most consistent album in decades.

Those rhythmically agile verses are often counterbalanced by sweeter, poppier choruses as producer Andrew Watt again delivers a modern-sounding Rolling Stones record. Mick Jagger’s vocals are extraordinary. He has lost none of his power and dances around the percussive heart, while guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood serve the songs and the groove, rather than seeking to dominate.
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Squeeze on 'Trixies', Their Biggest Ever Tour and the Importance of Grassroots Venues - Stereoboard

Squeeze co-founder and lead singer Glenn Tilbrook has spoken of his excitement at joining hundreds of artists in celebrating the role of grassroots venues as part of Everywhere At Once, which will run between June 26 and 28. The UK-wide live music event will bring festival season directly to more than 400 grassroots music venues across the country, with some 2000 artists performing, representing the full spectrum of the country’s music scene.
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Squeeze - Trixies (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Over the course of 50 years, Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford have written a string of beloved, infectious pop hits influenced by the Beatles and the Kinks, from wry, observational kitchen sink dramas and bittersweet love songs.

But before they were Cool For Cats, a then teenage Difford and Tilbrook delved into the world of rock operas. For such natural storytellers, the opportunity to spin a narrative across 40 minutes or more, rather than the three-minute pop format, was irresistible.
The New World •

The race to save the Beatles

The Fab Four’s leading historian Mark Lewisohn is trying to finish his definitive trilogy – just as AI and algorithms start to rewrite their story

Mark Lewisohn is the foremost chronicler of the life of a ghost. For 50 years, he has spent each day immersed in the history of the Beatles, committed to writing the definitive and accurate history of the band that shaped global culture and continue to resonate decades later.

It’s a journey that has taken him around the world from dusty local newspaper archives to the hallowed vaults at Abbey Road, making him one of only a few people to hear the Beatles’ complete recording sessions. It’s helped inform his authoritative works on the band, and now a major new television documentary Evolver:62, available on Amazon Prime.

You might think then, everything there is to know about the Beatles has already been discovered. But as Lewisohn talks to me from his own extensive personal archive, surrounded by a lifetime of research, it’s clear the opposite is true, even 56 years after they split.
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Iron and Wine - Hen's Teeth (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Like the proverbial ‘Hen’s Teeth’, the eighth release from Iron & Wine is a rare beast. A record that wasn’t meant to be, it’s a collection of songs that arose as a happy accident from the same productive sessions in Laurel Canyon that birthed 2024’s Grammy-nominated ‘Light Verse’.

The musicians gelled so perfectly they kept working and soon multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Beam had enough songs for another album. Not that ‘Hen’s Teeth’ is a carbon copy. While it continues to draw on Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ and its confluence of jazz and folk, it has darker hues and themes than its airier predecessor.
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Howling Bells - Strange Life (Album Review) - Stereoboard

‘Strange Life’ represents a triumphant return for Howling Bells, some 12 years after their last album. Amid distorted, squalling guitars, thunderous riffs and swooning harmonies, the Australian indie-rock trio contemplate past regrets and their lives as working musicians. Full of sweeping, psychedelic melodrama and dark romance, the album’s quieter moments also deliver an abrasive update to the ‘60s girl group sound.
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Tyler Ballgame - For the First Time, Again (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Some voices demand to be heard. Voices that draw deserved comparisons with the greats like Roy Orbison, Harry Nilsson or Elvis Presley. ‘For the First Time, Again’, the debut album from the splendidly named Tyler Ballgame (born Tyler Perry), arrives with that voice fully formed. It’s deep, rich, full of warmth and utterly authentic. It’s surprising it took so long for his talent to be recognised.

Like Orbison he possesses a wide range which allows his voice to soar into the higher echelons, pulling on the heartstrings, while retaining a playful charm on the album’s lighter moments. Producers Jonathan Rado and Ryan Pollie wisely place Ballgame’s voice front and centre, using the same analogue technology as classic albums of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

They deploy lush multi-tracked harmonies, tape echo and propulsive acoustic guitar, while the piano recalls John Lennon and Nicky Hopkins’ work on the ‘Imagine’ album.
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Lucinda Williams - World's Gone Wrong (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Americana legend Lucinda Williams channels all her righteous anger into ‘World’s Gone Wrong’, her sixteenth studio album and collection of protest songs fearlessly confronting political and economic turmoil in the United States.

Williams has long wanted to write a protest record, having been drawn to Bob Dylan’s work in the 1960s and Bob Marley’s So Much Trouble In The World, which she covers here with Mavis Staples, doyenne of the civil rights movement. But events in the US over the past year drew her ire and provided the spark for these songs.
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Peaer - Doppelg�nger (Album Review) - Stereoboard

It’s fitting that ‘Doppelgänger’, the first album from Brooklyn slowcore trio Peaer in seven years, finds the band exploring how our identity changes and our perspectives shift over time. Its nine songs are a reflection and reckoning with people’s mental projection of themselves versus who they are.

The album arrives after a period of upheaval. The pandemic put paid to their 2020 tour, the lull giving founder Peter Katz time to reflect on how he had grown resentful towards music and “retreated into solitude”. By the time touring restrictions eased, he had taken a full-time office job, forced to balance his new corporate role with life as a musician.

Not that Katz stopped writing songs. Indeed, the changing viewpoints reflected on the album reflect its long gestation. And, while the album captures Peaer’s math-rock roots, infused with complex, shifting time signatures, it’s arguably their most accessible work yet.
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Anna of the North - Girl In A Bottle (Album Review) - Stereoboard

‘Girl In A Bottle’, the fourth studio album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Anna Lotterud under her Anna Of The North alias, charts a break-up amid the euphoria of ‘80s synth-pop. Despite the dance grooves, the record is underpinned by Lotterud’s signature sadness and late-night nostalgia for a love lost.

Essentially a mini album clocking in at just under 23 minutes, ‘Girl In A Bottle’ features just six full-length songs and two shorter ambient pieces, but packs an emotional punch despite its short running time.
Stereoboard.com •

All The Places We've Been: Midlake Reflect On 'A Bridge To Far' Prior To UK Tour - Stereoboard

When beloved Americana band Midlake convened to discuss their future a short time ago, they considered calling time on their 20 year career. It would have made their upcoming tour a valedictory affair; one last chance to commune and celebrate with fans.

Instead, the ties that bind this close-knit Texan sextet resulted in their new album ‘A Bridge To Far’, arguably the best of the trio of records they have released since original frontman and songwriter Tim Smith departed in 2012. It’s a widescreen-yet-reflective, personal record that draws on both their alt-folk beginnings and the dusty desert rock of their more recent work.
Stereoboard.com •

Sorry - Cosplay (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Sorry’s third album is the sound of a band fearlessly throwing off the shackles and refusing to be pigeonholed as Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen explore a diverse and overlapping range of styles, recorded with various collaborators in multiple studios. The production on ‘Cosplay’ veers from lo-fi to full-on multilayered anthems.

In the past, critics have drawn attention to the post-punk, grunge, jazz and trip-hop influences of their earlier work and while ‘Cosplay’ contains all those influences, its big choruses and chunky guitars suggest it’s perhaps best approached simply as pop, the band’s own preferred descriptor.

As they hop from the dreamy, bubblegum sounds to heavier, darker, unsettling tones, it’s an adventurous roller coaster ride. If, at times, it threatens to come off the rails, that’s part of the fun.
Stereoboard.com •

Mavis Staples - Sad And Beautiful World (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Mavis Staples stands as one of the defining and most enduring voices in gospel, R&B and soul, her legendary status assured having started singing in family group The Staple Singers more than seven decades ago.

At the heart of ‘Sad and Beautiful World’, her 14th solo studio album, is that remarkable voice, which, at 86, exudes quiet gravitas and compassion, offering solace amid heartbreak.
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Ella Eyre - Everything, In Time (Album Review) - Stereoboard

‘Everything, in time’ is a fitting title for Ella Eyre’s first full length release in 10 years; a bold, spirited record infused with retro soul, funk and R&B vibes. Not that the years since 2015’s ‘Feline’ have been fallow. After hitting number one with her debut release, as featured artist on Rudimental’s 2013 megahit Waiting All Night, she enjoyed a run of singles chart success.

But it’s also been a decade of personal upheaval. Surgery on her vocal cords left her needing to learn to speak and sing again, while she has spoken candidly about the impact of romantic break-ups and the loss of her father. Furthermore, she split with her label, decided to scrap her masters and begin again.

The results bear out the promise that good things come to those who wait. Eyre has been rewarded for her patience and resilience — this is the sound of a newly independent artist confident in her identity and voice, doing things her way.
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Skullcrusher - And Your Song Is Like A Circle (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Skullcrusher’s ‘And Your Song Is Like A Circle’ is a gorgeous, shimmering slice of folk with layered, ghostly harmonies. With songs built around elegant piano and acoustic guitar, plus scattered electronics and beats, New York singer-songwriter Helen Ballentine creates a dreamscape as she probes the way grief turns itself out, the feeling itself becoming as real and substantial as what’s been lost.

This dreamy palette perfectly captures the mood of the writing, which explores memories, dreams and the imagination, places where those we mourn still reside. It’s Ballentine at her most vulnerable and human, her hushed vocals lending a confessional air to the material.
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They Are Gutting A Body Of Water - Lotto (Album Review) - Stereoboard

After flirting with electronics and ambient sounds, experimental Philadelphia shoegazers They Are Gutting a Body of Water go back to basics on ‘Lotto’, their fourth studio album. It’s an uncompromising, unflinching, confessional record with menacing, fuzzy, scratchy guitars. Clocking at just over 27 minutes, there’s not an ounce of fat here.

Tired of a world of artifice, frontman and founding member Doug Dulgarian vowed to make an album rife with perceivable mistakes and ebbs and flows with “the most humanity I can place on one record.”
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Madi Diaz - Fatal Optimist (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Last year represented a career high for Madi Diaz. Her sixth studio album ‘Weird Faith’ received two Grammy nominations as she enjoyed a higher profile after opening for Harry Styles before joining his tour band. ‘Fatal Optimist’, however, finds Diaz’s faith in love shattered. A break-up album, it’s raw and stripped back in a manner that’s even more intimate than her previous work, which always skewed personal and confessional.

These songs were written during a period of introspection as Diaz retreated to an island to process her grief in a way that brings to mind Justin Vernon’s log cabin sojourn before the first Bon Iver album. She distilled the resulting reflections and what she calls a newfound “inner wholeness” into a batch of 11 soul-searching songs.
Stereoboard.com •

Flock of Dimes - The Life You Save (Album Review) - Stereoboard

Jenn Wasner launched Flock of Dimes as a solo project in 2011, seeking to explore the more atmospheric and experimental side of songwriting and recording outside the success of beloved folk indie-rockers Wye Oak.

But her remarkable new album, the third under the alias, strips back the production to minimal synths and electric guitars, focusing on the most direct songs of her career. Its 12 haunting tracks delve the depths of addiction and co-dependency, inherited and experienced trauma, and the process of finding peace in the face of others’ suffering.

Her emotions laid bare, Wasner’s extraordinary vocals are placed front and centre. Sometimes she sounds optimistic, the songs serving as a mantra. Elsewhere, she sounds broken. It’s a profound, deliberate choice to leave the humanity in.
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Jay Som - Belong (Album Review) - Stereoboard

‘Belong’ may be the first album since 2019 from Jay Som, the alias of LA songwriter Melina Duterte, but it’s far from a musical comeback. Duterte has spent those six years as an in-demand musician, engineer and producer, winning a Grammy for her work on The Record by boygenius, the band she subsequently joined as a touring member.

She draws on all those experiences to create an expansive album that retains a sense of intimacy while embracing indie rock anthems, hazy ballads, shimmering electronics and ambient experiments.

The collaborative spirit of the past half-decade carries through to ‘Belong’, which features guest vocalists for the first time on a Jay Som album.
Stereoboard.com •

Idlewild - Idlewild (Album Review)

Anniversaries often give cause for reflection and a chance to bask in former glories. But in releasing their 10th album three decades on from forming in Edinburgh, Idlewild instead look to the future while celebrating their past. ‘Idlewild’ is a statement about where they are today by all the people they have been along the way.

They have embraced many genres over the past 30 years since emerging as a teenage punk band before their commercial 2000s peak and, most recently, embracing art rock experimentation. Touring to mark the 20th anniversary of their highest charting album, 2002’s ‘The Remote Part’, helped them reconnect with that journey and consider what came next.
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A Life That Might Inspire Others: Modern Nature Discuss 'The Heat Warps' - Stereoboard

Modern Nature’s latest album ‘The Heat Warps’ opens to the sound of dual guitars echoing, weaving, dancing around each other. It’s a world away from the impressionistic, abstract approach of the alternative rock band’s previous albums and finds them adopting a less-is-more philosophy.

While 2023’s ‘No Fixed Point In Space’ embraced free-jazz and the avant-garde, ‘The Heat Warps’ is the sound of a tight four-piece band, influenced instead by the simpatico playing of guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd on Television’s iconic 1977 debut ‘Marquee Moon’.

It is, in every way, the antithesis of their previous modus operandi. In its place is something more direct, more succinct, while retaining a playful energy. The shift back towards something more structured began during the last tour as they pulled away from the open-ended approach of the album they were then promoting.
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