Blood High Star

Richard Skelton's slow unpicking of American history draws to a close on an album which boils with righteous anger

Blood High Star by Burnt Harbors

Burnt Harbors is the latest entity used by Richard Skelton to make music about the times we now find ourselves living in. A composer and artist with an extensive, fascinating catalogue, Skelton’s music is generally instrumental and could be described as ambient, if associations with relaxation and reassurance could be stripped from the word. Alongside the music released under his own name, he has devised separate identities which he uses to record music about the USA. Burnt Harbors is an evolution of his Imperial Valley moniker, under which he made several albums about the Great...

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DJ K, photo by @joca24k

2025 was an odd one. The electronic music scene, at least a considerable part of it, reaffirmed its position as one of the most politically vocal cultural spheres. Amid the genocide in Gaza, political discourse about boycotts, Israeli artists and institutions partnering with the rogue state largely overshadowed conversations about new music. Global macropolitics were mirrored in the culture war that splintered the scene. On a positive note, many artists did use their platform to voice their criticism, while some naysayers and piss-takers under the “politics and music don't mix”...

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The Vertical Luminous

Mind and body, natural and synthetic become smudged and smeared in the latest from Brighton-based artist Paul Wilson

Throughout The Vertical Luminous, shimmering vignettes of celestial melodies morph into unexpected shapes without concern for the verse-chorus form. While retaining a semblance of what came before on 2017’s The Unstruck Sound Centre, Paul Wilson’s new LP as F.Ampism enters a new frontier of direct-to-ear fidelity for the Brighton-based artist’s solo work. The listener is routed through a sonic pipeline where the boundaries between the electronic and the organic have been smeared out of sight. Synthesizers and musique concrète form a symbiotic soundscape of collage and, through Wilson’s masterful mixing, a physical proximity to the sounds become nearly palpable, adding a...

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Looking at this year’s Reissues etc chart I was struck just how close in release date some of the records are to The Quietus’ founding in 2008. Our number one album came out just eight years before our official launch, the third only three years prior. You'll have to read the damn chart below to find out which records I'm talking about, but safe to say these are among our core artists – note that my fingers trembled typing this – perhaps part of what has become a Quietus canon.When John and I started...

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Factory Reset

Jake Brooks' third album in fifteen months speeds full-throttle into a messy digital future

Factory Reset by Retail Drugs

There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs' third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.

The album imagines a near-future where you can erase your past self. “Which I...

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A group of British Sri Lankan creatives are holding a fundraising event to help the survivors of Cyclone Ditwah this Sunday 7 December, from 3pm to 11pm at Big Chill Kings Cross. The Mutton Roll Daytimer combines the island’s favourite snack or ‘short eat’, the iconic mutton roll – a delicious deep fried pancake roll filled with spiced mutton and potato (or veggie options of similar delicious provenance) with a day’s worth of DJ talent programmed by Niro, one of the event’s co-founders. He will be DJing alongside the likes of multi-genre experimentalist My Panda Shall...

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Morte(s) Nee(s) by Celeste

CELESTE, Lyon’s avant-garde metallers, had an unexpected viral moment in November last year. Five women on a girl’s night out travelled from Liverpool to Birmingham for what they assumed was a gig by easygoing, Mercury-nominated singer Celeste. Instead they walked into The Asylum venue (surely a clue this wasn’t the gig they were looking for) after support band Grief Ritual (surely an even bigger clue) finished up, just before the headliners took to the stage and pummelled the sparsely attended audience into submission. 

Realising the group’s mistake, one sympathetic metalhead in...

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Lisané Bahir

Ethio-jazz meets modular synths on this thrilling record from the Ethiopia-born, LA-based musician

LISANÉ BAHIR ልሳነ ባሕር by Kibrom Birhane

The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.

Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané...

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Lavinia Blackwall

Not content to merely look back at the last 12 months of New Weird Britain’s musical content, fine as it’s been, this evening I’ve looked back eight years to the first of these year-ending listicle burbles I wrote, and each one after from 2018 to 2024. You can imagine how evocative a set of time capsules these all were! That’s right, not very. The repeat appearance of certain themes, credos and rhetorical devices in the introductions, as...

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HAYWARDxDÄLEK

New Jersey rapper and South London drummer team up and tear it up over nine tracks of deep beats and mangled melodies

Back in 2023, From The Other (the creative bods behind Fat Out Fest) invited Charles Hayward and Will Brooks (AKA MC Dälek) to collaborate as part of their artist development programme Samarbeta. What started off as an improvised work, combining synth, drums, and samples, grew over the course of a week into a live performance with Brooks then taking the recordings back to his New Jersey studio to mix and add lyrics.

Deadverse Studio is the Garden State-based headquarters for Brooks’ main creative outlet – Dälek – a heavy as fuck hip-hop outfit that utilises walls of...

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Orcutt Shelley Miller, photo by Rachel Lipsitz

Guy Williams is a righteously angry comedian from New Zealand. He punctuates his sets simply by highlighting something dreadful that has occurred recently. Then he will buckle his lanky frame and scream into the microphone. Those bits, regularly used as an unsubtle segue into Williams’ next topic, aren’t particularly side-splitting. They can, nevertheless, be very cathartic. “White supremacy is back. AAARGH!” That’s one example. Another: “The world is ending. AAARGH!” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

2025 has indeed been another period when it’s felt easy to get onboard with Williams’ pessimistic desperation.

Black Sabbath played their ever final concert and then...

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'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a clump of earthworms in a musician’s mouth. John and Luke, as has become part of tQ’s annual tradition, try and stifle their beleaguered coughing fits long enough to praise the the length… the depth… the breadth… the sheer freaky might of this year’s Albums of the Year chart. As well as Aya's Hexed – which contains one of the weirdest sleeve photos in recent memory – the pair summon vast reserves of praise...

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The Cyclist Conspiracy

Sailing down the middle of the Danube, our guide points out that the largest parliament building in Europe is on our left. He says Hungary opened the first metro in Europe. Since the UK left the EU, he adds, we can now say that without hesitation.

We are at the Budapest Music Hub River Party. The event showcases music from Central and Eastern Europe, serving as an opportunity to meet and discuss perspectives on the music industry in the region. Earlier in the...

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Buletten & Blumen

The fourth LP from the Berlin-based electronic music producer hums with retro-futuristic warmth served with a plentiful side of shits and gigles

The opening track of Buletten & Blumen, Siriusmo’s fourth album, is multi-faceted. 'That Could Funktion As A Song' begins with the sound of a computer logging on. A metronome starts. Then a stranger mutters “Hmmm… cool. So that could function as a song… I guess.” The uncanny voice has all the emotional detachment of a scripted call centre helpline or, more chillingly, an AI. “Ok, ok,” says that voice again “I like instruments,” but the intonation is off. It builds symphonically before fading out into the clatter of computer keys being punched. Herbie Hancock meets The Muppets'...

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Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally. His solo debut Unite The Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a...

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Composer Rafael Anton Irisarri, who recently released a remix collection featuring the likes of The Bug, Penelope Trappes, William Basinski and Abul Mogard, has unveiled details of a new album. Called Points Of Inaccessibility, the album was recorded in New York after development in improvised sessions of bowed guitar drones in former psychiatric institution the Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht. Here, Irisarri collaborated with Dutch visual artist Jaco Schlip as he created projections for joint A/V performances. “Points Of Inaccessibility came from thinking about how disconnection feels in an age obsessed with connection," says Irisarri, "We are constantly online, constantly visible, yet we drift further apart. The real distance isn’t geographic anymore, it’s...

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Xiu Xiu have announced a new covers album, Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu: Vol. 1, to be released on 16 January via Polyvinyl.

The record sees the longstanding experimental outfit interpreting the likes of Talking Heads, Robyn, Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell and more.

Said the band's Jamie Stewart: “We have a long history of doing covers and have done 3 albums of covers. The enduring and basic throughline with all of them is an attempt to say thank you to those songs. They are all in one way or another pieces of music that have moved us and exploring them in a deep way is a...

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Photo by Steve Gullick

Mute have announced the signing of Dearborn band Prostitute, whose 2024 debut Attempted Martyr will receive a long-awaited worldwide physical release ahead of a new European tour.

Originally released on a small independent run, Attempted Martyr has since accrued significant word-of-mouth acclaim (and an in-depth feature in these pages) for its incendiary mixture of hardcore punk, noise, and middle eastern music.

Mute's new editition of the record is out on CD and two vinyl editions – a limited 'Arabic edition' on 'Lebanese sunburst vinyl' available exclusively through Dinked, and a...

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Messa, photo by Nicola Pianalto

2025 will undoubtedly go down as an important year in metal history, if only for the heartbreaking number of generational voices and visionary musicians we lost over the last 12 months. As sad as it is to say goodbye to artists we’ve grown up listening to, there’s a distinct inevitability to it at this point; if we’re taking Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut as year zero, then heavy metal as a concept will be 56 years old next year, and we’ll likely lose even more of the genre’s old guard as the...

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Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

Moor Mother's 2019 album gets an orchestral upgrade

For around a decade, Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa has been constructing sonically experimental and thematically radical works of art. As Moor Mother, the musician and poet’s art often offers searing takedowns of structures of oppression and on the imperialism, colonialism and brutality that has resulted in generations of Black trauma. She delves deep into this on her 2019 album Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, the sense of widespread socio-political discontent illustrated by the record’s brutal, auditory chaos. Now, in her latest release, Moor Mother reissues that same album as a brand new orchestrated edition, featuring the string quintet Wooden Elephant...

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Watch It Die

Canadian post-punks have all the right slogans, but the sound feels all too familiar, finds Hayley Scott

Watch It Die by Home Front

Home Front’s third album lands with the uneasy thud of a watered-down Protomartyr filtered through the pop-punk polish of Green Day and the more saccharine edge of Turnstile. The vocals, presumably meant to come off as rousing or anthemic, tilt almost instantly into cringe, a strained uplift that might read as “big” but feels gratingly hollow to anyone actually listening.

Some melodies gesture, faintly, toward a Replacements-esque sensibility, but the comparison falls apart as soon as you register how little this material risks. The record feels locked in a dated palette, an awkward collage of monochrome hardcore...

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Acid Horse, the festival co-organised by tQ's own John Doran (with Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press) has been announced for the Whitsun bank holiday weekend May 2026, with a wide ranging line up spread over three days and two stages.

Taking place at its regular home – the idyllic Barge Inn, Honeystreet, Wiltshire, under the wise eye of the Alton Barnes chalk horse that it is named for – next year's edition, held on May 22 to 24, will see live sets from Mohammad Syfkhan, Lord Spikeheart, Hedgling, E The Artist, Bruise Blood, Loula Yorke and Sarah Angliss,...

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Metal Machine Music: Power to Consume, Vol. 1

Several salutes to Lou Reed’s most returned release, featuring Thurston Moore, Pharmakon, Drew MacDowall and others

It’s no wonder Lou Reed often got grumpy with those who interviewed him. Whether they were partial to his output or confounded by whatever he’d been up to, journalists constantly urged Reed to explain himself.

This was especially true in regard to 1975’s Metal Machine Music. It was by no means the first example of “noise music” in the history of the human eardrum but it was one of the most notorious and therefore influential. In the immediate aftermath of its release, and then for the rest of Reed’s life and long career, people were determined to figure...

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Rupert Hine in NYC, early 1980s courtesy of Buried Treasure

THE SHOUT by Rupert Hine

One of the theories around pareidolia – the tendency to see recognisable forms in otherwise nebulous materials such as faces in clouds, or animal outlines in rocks – is that it bestows an evolutionary head start on those who have it. It gives the body a split-second response before any thought takes place, rather than allowing time for confirmation that there is a ravenous sabre-toothed tiger, or the last...

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Mud Again

The debut album from London-based noiseniks shakes the habitual

mud again by leather.head

‘World Building’, the opening track from Leather.head’s debut album, starts with a big bang of a guitar riff which subsides shortly after. The lulling pace of the song’s verse, echoing Alen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, contrasts with the thunderous chorus.​Creation and destruction go hand in hand on Mud Again, an eight-piece work by the five-piece London-based collective. A juxtaposition that also defines the realm of political activism to which the band members have adhered. The founding core – brothers Toby, Josh and Aidan Evans-Jesra – have effectively voiced their ideas through music since 2016. The lack of racial diversity on the music scene in Brighton (their home at the time)...

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Changes In Air

The Canadian composer's third album of 2025 is all about material textures and subtle variations

Changes in Air by Kara-Lis Coverdale

For crafters of ethereal, drum-less music there’s a fine line between producing passive content for a Spotify playlist of calming music to train AI to and something more profound. It’s a balance that Kara-Lis Coverdale always gets right. Depth, detail and a sense of subtle drama give her music presence beyond inert background.

Changes in Air’s opening track, ‘Strait of Phase’, begins with slow striding organ, a steady pattern imbued with delicate harmonic variation. Intensity rises, as if you’re leaning on the volume button of your playback device, amplitude creeping up almost imperceptibly. Gradually the harmonic movement flattens out...

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One of the scant benefits bestowed by editing a countercultural magazine born in a time of great financial turmoil is that you eventually develop a state of permanent readiness for the next disaster. In the very early days of the Quietus, when my good friend Luke Turner and I were first unceremoniously shown out of the start up office door onto the street in 2008 – thanks Global Financial Crisis! – our magazine was just a matter of weeks old. We had barely established ourselves in a proper headquarters when we realised our existence was to be one of indefinite threat...

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Cabin in the Sky

The Long Island hip hop legends have always been a darker, edgier group than most give them credit, but their first new album in nearly a decade proves them more than capable of taking the 2020s rap sxcene head on, finds Liam Inscoe-Jones

For a while, you would have beeen forgiven for thinking that, as per the promise of their 1991 album, perhaps De La Soul were, finally, dead. It had been quiet for some time. Twenty-one years of label strife and copyright skirmishes, with only 2016’s And the Anonymous Nobody serving as a brief intermission. Then, tragedy struck. In March 2023, when Dave “Trugoy” – one of the groups’ two MCs; a soft spoken, Dadaist...

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Aphex Twin has shared two new songs via his user18081971 SoundCloud account.

The two tracks are titled 'Zahl am1 live track 1' and 'Zahl am1 live track 1c f760m1 unfinshd', and are alternate versions of the same song. Aphex Twin shared them alongside a cover image featuring himself and his partner swimming on holiday.

"Got many requests for this one from a few years back," the artist wrote in the 'Zahl am1 live track 1c f760m1 unfinshd' SoundCloud description. "Italy, pic with my love from Sicily recently. Need sun, relentlessly raining in the UK. Mixed down on the Zähl, think there are better...

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Photo by Woody Bos

Dekmantel has announced the addition of morning programming to its festival offering next summer.

The Amsterdam event returns to its usual Amsterdamse Bos home in August, and doors will now open two hours earlier each day, at 11am. Across the festival's Selectors, Greenhouse and RADAR stages, a number of acts will play special sets in those extra hours to open the day.

Dekmantel At Dawn will include a live improvisation-based opening performance by James Holden & Surgeon, as well as special sets by Jeff Mills, DJ Sprinkles, Jane Fitz, Eris Drew, Channel One, Colin Benders, and Satoshi Tomiie & Kuniyuki. Sampha is...

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Photo by Alex Heuvink

Dutch festival Rewire has revealed the first wave of acts playing its 2026 edition.

Taking place across four days in its usual home of The Hague, the event will feature two special performances by Caterina Barbieri. One of those will see her play in collaboration with ONCEIM, an orchestra of over 30 musicians for whom she has written a new composition. For the other set, Barbieri will play solo, premiering a selection of new music.

Also listed to play are Actress & Suzanne Ciani; Oneohtrix Point Never; Einstürzende Neubauten; Beverly Glenn-Copeland; Tortoise; SUMAC & Moor Mother; Jim O'Rourke & Eiko Ishibashi; Oliver Coates; Joanne Robertson;...

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Brian Eno, Neneh Cherry, Nadine Shah and a number of artists have united as Together For Palestine to record a new charity single, 'Lullaby'.

A cover of the traditional Palestinian song 'Yamma Mweel El Hawa', the English-language version has been written by Peter Gabriel, while the Palestinian musician Nai Barghouti arranged and recomposed the song alongside Shards' Kieran Brunt. It will be released next month with an aim to hit the Christmas No. 1 spot in the UK charts.

In a statement, Eno said: "After a year defined by unimaginable loss, grief and injustice, we want to end with an act...

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