
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.…

End of year round-ups can be a pretty predictable affair, with publications counting on fandoms of massive stars boosting their signal, be it an inflated spot on the chart, or a provocatively low spot designed to agitate. Of course, some massive releases are worthy of lofty positions, but we prefer to give spots to the…

On Monday, we’ll be announcing our LPs of 2023. We figured that this will leave it late enough that no-one will surprise us with a complete masterpiece and ruin everything. We’ve tried to go for albums that are away from the grain, but honestly, it’s what we were listening to the most, so we’re not…

We are prepping ourselves to do our End Of Year lists, but it’s more of an emotional readying because they take ages to do. What doesn’t help is that everyone has started releasing Christmas songs to really give us a deadline. Thankfully, the one we’re sharing from Anastasia Coope is a little freaky gem. While…

Just the other day, everyone was sharing their Spotify Wrapped graphics and having a giggle and all that, but things were about to get tremendously serious at Spotify HQ. This week, the streaming behemoth announced that they’d be sacking 17% of their staff. That’s around 1,500 people losing their pay just before Christmas. Pretty brutal.…
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