hip hop
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMartel Zaire (Evil Ideas)Montenegro-born, Cyprus-based producer Martel Vladimiroff is a hard man to find out about. His meagre online imprint and extensive global travels make him seem more like “an asset in the field” than a musician. Whoever he is, his new EP, four tracks drawn from his second album of the same name, is a unique idea, well-executed. Inspired by the imperial ravaging of Africa and the ongoing horrors of its modern equivalent, with the Congo as prime exemplar, it’s a conceptual head-trip. A dense gumbo of African field recordings and tribal drums play off Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.They had hits, many great songs, and covered the same territory that later gave The Prodigy mega-success (Delete Everything contains a rackety reimagining of the two groups' 1994 collaboration, "Their Law"). Unfortunately, a combination of their major label stabbing them in the back, and being perceived by some critics as cartoonishly adolescent, faded them out in the mid-Nineties. But they Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Doja Cat is a fascinating one-off. She’s a rap-centric Californian artist whose background dips into everything from new age philosophy to skate culture. She’s the epitome of a 2020s singer who’s as much a social media phenomenon as a pop star (and has also been featured artist on tunes by almost everyone). Unafraid of quirk and wacky throwaway humour, it’s taken her a while to convince the dubious that she’s more than an amusing flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, while her latest album initially contains interest, it settles to a set of samey slow-jams.The recent single “Jealous Type” is Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the past decade, the Ohio alternative superstars Twenty One Pilots have cultivated a deep lore starting with 2015’s Blurryface, and continued through the subsequent albums of 2018’s Trench, 2021’s Scaled and Icy, and seemingly concluded with last year’s Clancy. Yet the duo of Tyler Joseph (vocals) and Josh Dun (drums) left proceedings on a cliffhanger.So perhaps predictably, their latest, Breach, continues the story. The yarn the duo has been spinning for ten years is a dystopian tale set in a fictional city called Dema. Dema is run by nine bishops, one of which is a titular Read more ...
Tom Carr
For Nova Twins, the alternative rock/metal duo of Amy Love and Georgia South, the years since 2020 have been a non-stop journey of evolution. Exploding from the independent UK rock scene, to sharing the stage with headline names like Bring Me The Horizon; attention has come very quickly for the now twice BRIT nominated duo.Their first two albums (2020’s Who Are The Girls, and 2022’s follow-up Supernova) were taken completely in their stride, brimming with a confident, sickly-sweet concoction of electronic infused rock with hip-hop and industrial tones. They were both exciting offerings; Read more ...
joe.muggs
The more time goes by, the more it seems like Dev Hynes might be the antidote to what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”. As is documented in the fantastic recent book Songs in the Key of MP3, Hynes is representative of a type of modern musician whose relationships to mainstream and underground, art and pop, just don’t make sense in the traditional “star” framework of the post rock’n’roll era. He’s defined not by having the biggest shows or iconic moments, but by his connections, his ability to cover ground, his success best defined not as a “rise” to fame but an expansion Read more ...
joe.muggs
The long, hot summer of 2025 has been something else, right? Hate rallies, creeping authoritarianism, a weird reluctance to discuss the extremity of the weather even as everyone scrambles to buy air conditioners...But also a slightly delirious sense of fun as people get out and about in the sun – exemplified by the eruptions of joy of DJ AG’s spontaneous pavement sets featuring unknowns and megastars, broadcast online as a super-democratic antidote to all those videos of DJs alone or surrounded by too-cool-for-school party people. Anyway, it’s all quite exhausting. I was feeling burned Read more ...
caspar.gomez
MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by dark brown rings. He looks peaky.“Why?” I enquire. Sweat nodules down my face, my body, everywhere. So saline-intense it leaves powdery white steaks.“My eyes,” he replies, “They’re wobbling about.”We pull over in Cannards Grave, a Somerset hamlet named for a thieving 17th century publican hanged here. Every third car passing contains battered detritus from the annual Worthy Farm pilgrimage.“You don’t look too good yourself,” says Finetime.“I’ll be fine.”But will I? Inside of my head Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins reigned supreme as producers – but through the 2010s and ‘20s, it has established a whole set of performers who are able to exhibit extreme range in subject matter, style and seriousness, held together with force of artistic personality.Post-Lemonade Beyoncé tends to absorb the majority of critical attention, but Kehlani, Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E Read more ...
joe.muggs
Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is currently suing for alleged failure to repay £1.7 million in loans for ambitious recording and performance projects.It’s a topic she returns to on at least two other tracks on the album, going into quite some detail about her sense of betrayal and broken trust and the impact of this on her sense of self and creative process. It feels kind of bleak that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s band, a unit once synonymous with phrases such as “trip hop” and “chill-out”, are up to album number 11. Their multi-million-selling oeuvre is based around a hazy combination of low-slung hip hop beats, stoned electronic atmospherics, spacey, slightly John Barry wah-wah guitar, and the luxurious voice of frontwoman Skye Edwards. Because the formula is always approximately the same, each album wins or loses dependent on whether they’ve nailed a sweet set of songs. On this occasion they do.Morcheeba has been the duo of singer Skye Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Weeknd is a global megastar, one of the biggest music sensations of the age. Last year, his compilation, The Highlights, was the second best-selling album in the world, and he has 27 songs with over a billion streams on Spotify, which is a record. His latest album is the third part of a trilogy which started, back in 2020 with After Hours. Unfortunately, where that, and its sequel, Dawn FM, were vibrant, contagious, catchy electronic pop, Hurry Up Tomorrow, is morose, lacking tunes and, boy, does it go on and on.There’s a fair bit worth listening to but, at almost an hour-and-a-half long Read more ...