
Many bands aim for Pet Sounds when they’re trying to make ambitious pop, but a lot of groups miss out on the pure, inventive, playful joy when they’re channelling Brian Wilson, Curt Boettcher & Co. There’s a shed pop, ramshackle feeling to when these things work best, like someone’s tripped over a box of classroom…

A Tory MP has attacked the whole of Drill music, because she thinks it is the reason that young people carry knives. Nickie Aiken says there’s a “direct link” and wants the government to look at record labels that release music that is found “celebrating gang culture.” At the House of Commons, the Cities of…

Never mind Tay Tay announcing a new LP – we can ignored that as everyone has already talked it to death already. We’re more interested in the imminent music from the mighty Kacey Musgraves. She’s been making a slow-melting psychedelic country music since her utterly fabulous ‘Golden Hour’ album (yes, that wasn’t her debut, but…

Look, we were all set to write and long love letter to Fonteyn’s utterly perfect LP ‘Trip The Light Fantastic’, even though it’s not a new release, because it really is one of the most wonderful records you’re likely to hear. The reason we were hesitating is purely selfish, and that was because we didn’t…

We’ve talked about our love for Dina Ögon at length before, and now there’s a new LP to talk about, and that’s the salve we needed to kick off 2024’s first new release review. Again, we find the band in groovy, sophisticated form, melting psychedelic soul, Balearic, dream pop, and something so uniquely their own,…

As the future of being a working musician looks increasingly bleak, collectively we need to work out a way of getting people paid. If we don’t, that means music will only be viable for people who have parents with blue links in their Wikipedia pages and the like. So, with micropayments and subscriptions becoming more…

Kanye has been at it recently and a lot of people have been talking about him being off the meds, which illness his brain has, how he’s not been the same since his mother died, and on and on and on and on and on and… It’s obvious that attention is one of the major…

Look, you should already be subscribed to BANDSPLAINING on YouTube. If you’re not, this is your heads-up. The latest video explains Library Music, so if you’ve been jonesing for someone to dissect what it is, what’s good about it, and who it influenced, this is a great primer to get you going. If you’re already…

Remember us telling you about the documentary about Scottish girl groups? We did, y’know? It sounded great didn’t it? Well, you may have thought you wouldn’t be able to watch it without getting in some narrow window of when it was aired at some fun, cool indie cinema somewhere. The good news is that you’ll…

Gracie Abrams has opened a can of worms this week, and that’s fine. Pop stars are supposed to run their mouths occasionally, and everyone else in turn, gets to run theirs. That’s the way pop culture works – it’s a contact sport. Speaking about Taylor Swift, she said: “There’s also nothing that comes close to…
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