
Pearl Charles is great. She’s made shimmering ’70s pop, glitterball disco, and cosmic singer-songwritery stuff. It’s the latter that her latest release errs on the side of, and it’s one of her best songs to date! She’s been working with the brilliant Michael Rault on her new music, and ‘Step Too Far’ is a brooding,…

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…

Such is the paid-for media churn these days, it almost feels redundant writing about bit single releases. What’s the point in telling you what we think, when you’ve already been alerted to the existence of a song, and listened to it yourself? It all reeks of us trying to vaguely grab some traffic off the…

The new radio show of ours – Free Range – is out. Music from all over the globe as ever, with new music from Panda Bear, Hayley Williams’ granddad, Everything Is Recorded, Vulfmon, and loads more. There’s a tribute to dear Marianne Faithfull too, as well as the usual shenanigans with a dreadful AI co-host.…

Do you like Four Tet? Well, new music is here! There’s a new LP coming out in March called ‘Three’ and it’ll be on Kieran Hebden’s own label Text, and because you invariably want a teaser, there’s a new song to listen to called ‘Daydream Repeat’. It’s below if you want to stop reading and can’t…

You get the impression that most musicians consider stan culture to be a necessary evil, because stans move product like musical drug mules. Of course, some stans are just super enthusiastic sorts, but there’s a good percentage of them that are over-zealous lunatics who want to prove they’ll go above and beyond, like supporting an…

There’s a difference between hearing a song that’s new to you and new music. Unless you’re actively seeking out new stuff like a massive nerd (hi there!) and tailoring the algorithm to give you the new good stuff, Spotify is generally quite bad when it comes to promoting new music from smaller acts with little…

Georgia has been making some great music over the past couple of years with loads of promise. It’s been R&Bish pop, but now, jjst before hitting the road with Kim Petras, there’s clearly one eye on the dancefloor. The track starts moodily before making way for some glorious doof doof action, and it’s very fun.…
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POP CULTURE IS WORTH TALKING ABOUT.
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