"A masterful, genre-spanning triumph" - The Independent *****
"The songs are among her finest" - Pitchfork (8.2 - Best New Music)
"Powerful and compelling" - The Guardian **** (Album of the Week)
"A record stuffed with imagination and packed with beauty"
- NME ****
"A bold concept for a dazzling album" - The Telegraph ****
"A sublime barrage" - The Times ****
"A deeply rewarding record with a dark edge" - The Wall Street Journal
"A work of ambition" - Rolling Stone
"Her darkest, most ambitious project yet" - Consequence of Sound
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"Glassy, danceable pop songs that smolder with radical undercurrents" - The New Yorker
"Restless evolution has been the only constant in Remy's musical universe" - New York Times
"One of the U.S's most brilliant, magnetic performers."
- The Guardian
"The most overly pop-y thing yet issued under the U.S. Girls name." - Metro ****
"Disco self-care…with stomping dance tracks and lush ballads." - Rolling Stone
The protean musical enterprise of multi-disciplinary artist Meg Remy, Heavy Light recounts personal narratives to create a deeply introspective about-face. The songs are an inquest into the melancholy flavour of hindsight, both personal and cultural. Remy makes this notion formally explicit with the inclusion of three re-worked, previously released songs: 'Statehouse (It's A Man's World)', 'Red Ford Radio', and 'Overtime'.
Heavy Light was produced by Remy and recorded live with 20 session musicians - including E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons - in Montreal's acclaimed Hotel 2 Tango studio. Remy worked with co-writers Basia Bulat and Rich Morel to develop the core of Heavy Light, a set of songs conceived as a balance between orchestral percussion (as richly arranged by percussionist Ed Squires) and the human voice (conducted by Kritty Uranowski). The resulting album finds Remy casting herself as lead voice among a harmonious multitude, the singers of which lend not only their voices, but also share reflections on childhood experiences that are collaged into moving spoken word interludes throughout the album.
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Purity Ring's hotly anticipated third album, WOMB, was released in April.
The album featured a number of singles: searching salve 'peacefall', which FADER called "a glistening transmission from inside the eye of the storm"; 'stardew', which Billboard praised as "pulsating"; kinetic 'pink lightning' called "sparkling" by Stereogum; and the propulsive 'i like the devil', which BrooklynVegan note as "throbbing [and] atmospheric".
WOMB is Purity Ring's first album in more than five years. The ten songs are entirely written, recorded, produced and mixed by the duo, and the album chronicles a quest for comfort and the search for a resting place in a world where so much is beyond our control.
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"Species finds Bing & Ruth at their transcendent, majestic best." - Record Collector ****
"They've created an album that melds into what feels like a massive piece, our patience is required to see how it unfolds, to realize what's contained inside, and what to do with that information if we ever uncover it." - The Line of Best Fit (8/10)
"Very calming." - NPR Music
"Everything feels seamless and organic, the sound of three people playing music out into never ending vistas." - Bandcamp (Album of the Day)
David says of the album, "Species is an album of music I wrote on the Farfisa organ and performed with my two friends who play clarinet and acoustic bass and I'm so happy to finally get to share it with everybody. Every song here is special to me on its own, but I've personally found a deeper experience in listening from beginning to end. Now that everyone can hear the album in full, I hope you can find your own enjoyment in that as well."
While on a surface level, Species is an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the Farfisa organ, aided only by a clarinet and double bass (played respectively by founding members Jeremy Viner and Jeff Ratner), it was inspired by two recent loves of Moore's: the desert and long-distance running. Briefly relocating from his New York base to Point Dume, between the Pacific Ocean and the desert, Moore was able to indulge in both passions, which in turn provided stimulus for new work.
Species is a study of suspended time and trance; not just a steady movement from A to B, but as something that flows, meanders and eddies, like water. Moore says, "I'd found myself in places unfamiliar enough that I could easily lose all sense of direction, size and, more than anything, all sense of time. The music I was making became a kind of reflection of these intentional detachments - and a place to mirror that feeling of trance that had pushed them out in the first place."
In late 2020 Bing & Ruth also digitally released Divergence: Species Remixes, a companion work to Species. The 5-song EP features reworkings of tracks by like-minded artists Khotin, Nailah Hunter, Lucy Gooch, Maria Somerville, and James Krivchenia.
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Becky and the Birds' debut EP for 4AD, Trasslig, was released in the summer.
Featuring the singles 'Do U Miss Me', 'Wondering' and 'Paris', Trasslig (Swedish for "entangled, messy, intricate") celebrates the complexity of womanhood. Producer and songwriter Thea Gustafsson says, "people are scared of women who could be both powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and there's no space for that. But's it's okay to be trasslig, to be all the parts of yourself."
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"As ferocious as she is refined...Tkay gets more gully with every verse as her rhymes glide over spiraling, disjointed production before diverging into a swampy NOLA bounce breakdown." - NPR Music on 'Shook'
"Maidza shines as a singer, laying down her hook over a fried-out vintage funk groove."
- Pitchfork on 'Don't Call Again'
"Rising Adelaide spitfire Tkay Maidza is shifting her gears. Get with it now, or have fun over there in the dust."
- The FADER
"A kinetic hip-hop dart that will make you long for a club -- any club! -- to reopen…one of her strongest singles to date"
- Billboard on 'Shook'
"Rap's freshest new act" - Nylon
Tkay Maidza is a tour de force on her new EP Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, her first EP for 4AD. Her mastery of sonic versatility takes center stage on the assertive eight tracks that weave from whiplash-inducing spitfire summer anthem and lead single 'Shook' to smooth boy-bye manifesto 'Don't Call Again (ft. Kari Faux)' to trap-infused 'Awake (ft. JPEGMAFIA)', which was nominated for a 2019 ARIA award and earned a best of the decade nod from The Needle Drop, as well as praise from Pitchfork, The FADER, Dazed, Complex, and others.
The release follows 2018's Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 1, which established her as one of the most exciting voices in the new guard of hip-hop.
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"It's the Twigs doing Bowie doing Springsteen, and utterly thrilling." - Uncut (9/10)
"A landmark album, unlike any other, that draws from the past, churns it up, modernises it and chucks it into our present with sonic-like energy through sheer effervescing talent." - The Line Of Best Fit (9/10)
"They are one of the most exciting new bands I've heard this century." - Simon Neil (Biffy Clyro)
"Songs For The General Public astonishes and delights." - MOJO ****
"A paean to the past, full of lovelorn warmth, Zombies-on-a-road-trip harmonies and ridiculous piano jams." - DIY
"A blast from start to finish." - Shindig! ****
"Camp flourishes, post-ironic perkiness and joyful melodies." - Q ****
The Lemon Twigs' third full-length album Songs For The General Public was released in August.
The D'Addario brothers wrote, recorded and produced the record entirely on tape at their Long Island home studio and Sonora Studios in Los Angeles. Brian and Michael D'Addario first emerged as The Lemon Twigs in 2016 with their debut LP Do Hollywood, whose showstopping melodies mined from every era of rock quickly earned fans in Elton John, Questlove, and Jack Antonoff. Go To School, the ambitious 15-track coming-of-age opus, followed in 2018 and solidified the band's reputation for building grand walls of sound around an audacious concept.
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"Melding melodic punch with brooding gloom, Future Islands' role as new wave torch bearers is assured on a sixth album gilded with emotional and sonic depth, symptomatic of their rising status as seasoned songsmiths." -
The Line of Best Fit (9/10)
"A marvellously-produced album that jumps out of the speakers, brimming with confidence and dripping with arena-sized existential anthems." - Loud and Quiet (8/10)
"Sumptuous." - Uncut (8/10)
"Existential bangers from Baltimore's most eccentric band." - NME ****
"One of the most anticipated albums of the season." - Consequence of Sound
"This album feels like the next step in their story, with more deeply felt New Romantic intensity than ever." - Rolling Stone
"The idiosyncratic synth-pop greats." - Stereogum
"Triumphant [and] inimitable." - NPR
"The band's sixth album is uplifting and a document of healing... It's Romanticism delivered." - Spin
In early October, Future Islands released their sixth album As Long As You Are.
As Long As You Are looks to the past as well as the future, confronting old ghosts and embracing a new hope. It is an album about trust, full of honesty, redemption and "letting go", allowing old wounds to heal and bringing painful chapters to a close.
Signalling a new era for Future Islands, touring drummer Mike Lowry officially joins as a fully-fledged member and songwriter bolstering the founding trio of William Cashion, Samuel T. Herring and Gerrit Welmers. Together, the four-piece took on official production duties for the first time, co-producing As Long As You Are with engineer Steve Wright at his Wrightway Studios in Baltimore. Given time to allow the songs to slowly come to life, these 11 new songs of post-wave synth-pop are as euphoric and uninhibitedly joyful as anything the band has done in their 14-year career.
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"One of the most graceful and intimate records in years."
- The Times *****
"It's quite extraordinary."
- The Independent *****
"Her songs feel age-old, with haunting serenity. The talent she possesses is something so special and rare. Lenker's songs seem to effortlessly flow out of her.
- Loud and Quiet (9/10)
"Spread across two albums that function as one stunning piece of music"
- Pitchfork (8.8 Best New Music)
"Lenker has produced a folk album which could sit amongst the best from her forebears."
- The Line Of Best Fit (9/10)
"One of the most cohesive, decorous albums of solo acoustic music in recent memory."
- DIY (4.5/5)
"Beautiful solo offering, Lenker's most unguarded album yet."
- Uncut (8/10)
"A tonic for the soul" - The i ****
"A soothing balm." - NME ****
In the autumn, Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker released two albums, songs and instrumentals. songs and instrumentals are two distinct collections, both written and recorded in April after Big Thief's March tour was abruptly cut short due to coronavirus. With a hankering to capture the feel of the space, Lenker enlisted the help of engineer Philip Weinrobe, gathering a mass of tape machines, a binaural head, and a pile of XLR cables. While songs represents more lyrical and traditional songwriting, instrumentals sees Lenker stretching out and exploring the space in 2 longer instrumental pieces.
