Jeremy Blackmore

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.

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.”

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada have entranced audiences with their contemporary takes on traditional Irish folk in their respective bands Landless and Lankum and both had contributed to each other’s records. So, when the couple were confined to their home in Sligo during lockdown, it was only natural that a new collaboration was born.

With The Jimmy Cake’s John Dermody joining later on drums and percussion, the newly formed Poor Creature turned those initial experiments into a captivating, otherworldly debut album called ‘All Smiles Tonight’, which features a mix of traditional songs reimagined and given a unique, personal approach, all sharing a unifying theme of loss and separation.

When Brad Kella walked into Liverpool’s Lime Street Station to audition for Channel 4 music competition The Piano, all he hoped for was five minutes on television to show what he could do and to make his family proud.

He could not have imagined the whirlwind year that lay ahead of him. Winning the final, where he dedicated a new self-composed piece to his beloved foster parents Eve and Frank, and performances at prestigious venues like the Royal Albert Hall have been only some of the highligh...

Sarah Blasko’s extraordinary, candid album ‘I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain’ found the Australian songwriter tackling goodbyes, grief, friendships and new beginnings as she let go of her younger self. Released at the end of last year, it was recently accompanied by a live recording of these remarkable songs captured at Sydney’s Factory Theatre, while she will perform the album in full at four UK dates in early July.

The songs, which showcase Blasko’s startling vocals, date back to the pandemic, a period that afforded time to reflect on her personal history. In 2020, the Sydney-based musician gave birth to her second child and experienced the rupture of a lifelong friendship, all while the world was in chaos. As the album’s promotional material notes, “the timing was oddly poetic, as two people who had been raised in a [Pentecostal] church, waiting for the apocalypse to strike, parted ways as it felt like that day was finally upon us.”

The enforced downtime that year forced Blasko to re-evaluate the past, to make peace with who she is and who she isn’t, the things that have come to be in her life and those that probably won’t. “For me, music is often a release,” she tells Stereoboard in a break before tour rehearsals in Belgium. “I’d found myself at a point in my life where I just didn't know what was next. I didn’t really know how to move forward. The answers weren’t coming.

“Also, I wrote it at a time where the world wasn’t really normal, and I reflected upon things I hadn't thought about for a very long time. Some of those things came about because of the end of the friendship, but I think they also came out because I actually had time to stop and process these things. That’s what music really offers me, that I feel very grateful for, being able to process things. It’s your take on a moment or a feeling, and that’s great, because you can just release things into the atmosphere.”

Much like his acclaimed novels, the songs Willy Vlautin writes for his beloved country-soul band The Delines are populated by ordinary people left behind, often itinerant and struggling in America’s backwaters. “I've always been drawn to people who have been a bit beat up and rattled,” he explains. “That was the world I knew.”

But it was a challenge laid down by singer Amy Boone backstage after a gig in Dublin that led Vlautin to tell a more romantic tale, one with a happy ending, on the title track of the group’s sixth studio album ‘Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom’.

“Music is life, and like it, inextinguishable,” Danish composer Carl Nielsen said of his fourth symphony. Music has the power to soothe the soul and lift the spirit – a therapeutic effect fully embraced by the 100 European medics who recently gathered in Gateshead.

Swapping their stethoscopes and surgical instruments for musical ones, the European Doctors Orchestra (EDO) celebrated its 20th anniversary at Gateshead’s iconic Glasshouse International Centre for Music.

“We were each other’s professors,” says keyboardist and composer Irmin Schmidt, founder of revolutionary German band Can, recalling the special alchemy between the musicians he assembled as an experiment to fuse together various strands of 20th-century music.

Schloss Nörvenich, a 14th-century castle southeast of Cologne, was an unlikely setting for such a revolution. Yet Schmidt and the four companions who gathered there in a makeshift studio in 1968 were determined to throw off the old order and create a new culture – one that rejected not only German tradition but would be entirely distinct from mainstream rock in Britain and America.

Underpinned by repetitive, hypnotic rhythms, they forged an uncompromising, challenging new sound, their music bristling with a spirit of anarchy.

C Duncan is an incurable romantic, which partly explains why the Scottish singer-songwriter is also a devotee of lush, multi-layered arrangements with swooning strings, classicist melodies and dreamy harmonies. In his world, the more lavish and grand things get, the better.

“I love the idea of something being so romantic that it almost hurts,” he says. “I do think there is a place for romantic music — Burt Bacharach-style songs that you just don’t hear in the charts, or anywhere, now. Nobody’s really writing them.”

Washington Coliseum, February 1964: The Beatles are playing their first concert in the US. Paul McCartney steps up to the mic and delivers a rock ‘n’ roll tour de force, raising the roof with a screaming cover of Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally.

It’s a truly electrifying moment in Martin Scorsese’s new Disney+ Beatles ’64 documentary, distilling the excitement of that tumultuous year into two minutes of raw energy amid the Fab Four’s conquest of America.

In particular, McCartney’s confidence in that moment is astonishing. Sixty years later, that same man is now in his 80s, but his infectious love of music and performance is undimmed as he brings his triumphant Got Back Tour to the UK with two shows each at Manchester Co-Op Live and London O2 Arena.

Welcome to Stereoboard's Album of the Year rundown for 2024, where we delve into 12 months of head-spinning, pulse-quickening, thought-provoking music. Join us.

The idea of flight permeates ‘Born Horses’, Mercury Rev’s latest album. “I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings,” sings frontman and lyricist Jonathan Donahue during the title track, while on the closing song he declares “there’s always been a bird in me”.

But, when Donahue first sang one of its melodies into a cassette recorder along the banks of the Hudson River, he was taken aback. “I opened my mouth and out comes this bird,” he says. “It was a completely different bird that sang. I didn't expect it. I didn’t know the name of the bird. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn't know how long it was going to stay. I was surprised at the lower register, the whiskery elements to it.”

It’s a voice full of intimacy, awe and wonder, lending itself fittingly to a reflective collection of songs that finds Donahue pondering humanity’s yearning for love, and its need to seek order in the seeming randomness of life. “Maybe it’s the same way we all wake up in the morning, and we expect to see who we see in the mirror,” Donahue continues. “One day you wake up and you see someone different, maybe with older lines on the face or the eyes are burning a little brighter.”

West Berlin is baked into the DNA of Einstürzende Neubauten. Pioneers of the nascent industrial scene, they are a band that could only have been forged in that uniquely creative island city, with all its dereliction, poverty and cold war paranoia.

Forced to fashion unconventional instruments out of electronics and “found” objects such as sheet metal, drills, jackhammers and various detritus due to lack of money, necessity proved the mother of invention. That lack of expensive instruments encouraged experimentation as they embarked on a string of landmark albums in the best tradition of Dadaism and musique concrète.

Sananda Maitreya’s journey through music has been a Promethean odyssey for an artist focused on following his own direction and sense of integrity even when others failed to support or recognise his vision. Now, after 22 years away, he is ready to make a triumphant live return to the UK when he steps on stage at Love Supreme Jazz Festival, which runs from July 5 to 7 at Glynde Place in East Sussex.

Proudly refusing to be pigeonholed, his unique, exciting, confident brand of rock, infused with soul, funk, R&B and jazz, was evident even on his debut album ‘Introducing The Hardline According To…’, which was released under his original name Terence Trent D’Arby in 1987, and on a run of major singles chart hits too, including Sign Your Name and the US number one Wishing Well.

But after follow-up ‘Neither Fish nor Flesh’ and subsequent albums failed to reach the same commercial heights, he walked away from his former identity altogether, tired of the bitterness and disappointment he felt about the music industry. Changing his name to Sananda Maitreya in 2001, he took control of his career and settled in Milan, where he has built a new life with his wife Francesca Francone, an Italian architect, journalist and television host, and their two sons.

From his Italian base, Maitreya embarked on a prolific run of genre-hopping albums he’s dubbed ‘post Millennium’ rock, which call to mind the White Album by Maitreya’s beloved Beatles in their scale, range and ambition. Built around mythological themes and set in an expanded universe, the projects showcase the magical, mystical, freewheeling adventures he now has in music, with ‘The Pegasus Project: Pegasus & The Swan’ the latest to arrive.

Goat Girl’s ‘Below The Waste’ finds the south London band taking a voyage of discovery into the personal and political, where the journey itself is more important than the destination.

Pieced together like a collage, the record explores different soundscapes and genres, transitioning effortlessly between expansive, industrial-tinged noise-rock, psychedelia, delicate folk experimentation, stark minimalism, candid, fragile ballads and engaging electronica.

Now 80, legendary Merseybeat star Billy J. Kramer is back with a new album and is to be honoured in Liverpool

Sheffield is in Richard Hawley’s DNA, his albums infused with the indefatigable spirit of the proud northern industrial city even as he plays music inspired by American rock and roll, country, bluegrass and gospel.

While many of his albums have borne the names of its landmarks, it is from the camaraderie and resolve of the place’s people that the songwriter draws the most inspiration. His latest release, 'In This City They Call You Love', takes its name from a familiar term of endearment, so commonplace in Sheffield, but something that nevertheless gives Hawley hope.

He expands on the sentiment during People, effectively the title track on an album of beautifully crafted songs reminiscent of his early solo work. It serves as a love letter to fellow Sheffielders, an acoustic ballad built around a phrase he overheard walking past people sitting outside a bar.

For more than half a century The Beach Boys have represented the endless sound of summer against a backdrop of the Californian surf, set to some of the most gloriously transcendent harmonies ever committed to tape. In a remarkable run of success that produced some of the 60s’ most memorable and beloved hit singles, the band also produced one of that decade’s most revered albums in ‘Pet Sounds’, one that rivalled even The Beatles in ambition and creativity.

But their story is also one of family, once combined in harmony, later fractured, and of tragedy, with the early deaths of two original members. With the surviving Beach Boys now entering their 80s, it’s fitting their lasting legacy is being celebrated with two new landmark projects – their only official book, The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys, and a documentary simply called The Beach Boys, which streams on Disney+ and reunites the band in a coda, made even more poignant given legendary composer Brian Wilson’s recent diagnosis with a “major neurocognitive disorder”.

Lea Salonga is musical royalty. A child star in the
Philippines, she originated the title role in Miss
Saigon in the West End aged 18. The role catapulted
her international career and sealed her place in
musical theatre history, with both Olivier and Tony
Award wins. She was the first Asian actor to play
both Éponine and Fantine in Les Misérables on
Broadway and has voiced two Disney princesses.