After the moderately quiet but of course far from silent month of January we’re back with a bumper blaster in this month’s Subscriber Playlist stakes, with about five hours of music from the likes of Cobrah, Hen Ogledd, Shackleton, Lana Del Rey, Bill Callahan, Kevin Richard Martin, Maria BC, Peaches, Loula Yorke, Jill Scott, Annie Hogan, Squarepusher, Kim Gordon, Robyn, Converge, Geologist, Alan Sparhawk, Sunn O))) and much much more. You can of course find out which of these made it to our music of the month list here. Just to recap, for our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members, the Low Culture Podcast for February was on Missy Elliott’s Miss E… So...

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From the ashes of legendary Newcastle drone metal band Bong comes Bong II, as vocalist & bassist Dawn Terry reunites with drummer Mike Smith whilst welcoming Smote’s Daniel Foggin on guitar.

“I very much wanted it to be a continuation – being the original Bong but minus one member, it’s not far off,” Dawn explains. “I really love what Amon Düül did with Amon Düül II, so it’s a little bit of a nod to them. There’s a certain absurdity already to the name of the band, Bong, and to add the II on the end, it adds a whole new...

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I Want To Be Ready

New album by Philadelphia post-rock duo keeps things tight, amps up the tension

I Want To Be Ready by The Early

The songs across <i>I Want to be Ready</i> are in no rush to introduce themselves. They bask in their own ambient delight until they feel ready to shout. The Philadelphia outfit unfurl across an iridescent run of five tracks, each one more grandiose than the previous. Instruments and textures retreat as quickly as they appear, creating a distinct sense of dynamism. There’s a potent sense of urgency to some of these recordings, and a twinge of unease, yet it never strays into a Swans-like delirium. The mallet-driven verve of tracks like ‘Sand Clock’ grounds the record,...

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kinickie Lauren Laverne Marie du Santiago Emmy-Kate Montrose NY 1995

What’s the missing link between Ricky Gervais and Kurt Cobain? The answer is Martyn Goodacre. In 1989, he was skint, a wannabe music photographer working in a stationery shop at the University of London where the Student Union’s Entertainments Officer began giving him passes for shows. Within just months, he’d prepared his portfolio, and though it took persistence – not to mention pockets of small change so he could pester their offices from his local phone box – he soon landed his first NME commissions.

Working out of a darkroom...

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While the depths of winter continue to punish myself and other readers in the UK, the past four weeks have been rich as ever in delivering standout full-length records and on-repeat new tracks as 2026 fully whirs into life. As ever, tQ's staffers have pulled together to round up our favourite music of the past month, picking out meandering, percussive psychedelia from Shackleton, chaotic protest music by Hen Ogledd, abyssal ambient from Kevin Richard Martin, and plenty more.

Everything featured below, as well as all the other knockout music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will be compiled into an hours-long...

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Much has been written about the Transatlantic fallout of punk rock, with every crevice of the era meticulously scanned in the hope of a lost classic. Whilst Circle X’s fractious run, two albums and two EPs, over a span of seventeen years, might not signify complete unknown status to seasoned crate-diggers, their minimal place in the history books belies their brilliance. 

Formed in 1978, in Louisville, Kentucky – by brothers Rik and David Letendre, alongside Tony Pinotti and Bruce Witsiepe – Circle X emerged from the ashes of the city’s very first punk bands No Fun and The I-Holes, surfing the shockwaves created...

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Nothing’s About to Happen to Me

Mitski decamps to Nashville for an album of murder ballads that leans a little country

Nothing's About to Happen to Me by Mitski

Mitski has a talent for creating unique and unifying sounds for her albums. In the same way the acoustic arrangements of her previous album, 2023’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, leaned close to folk, the pedal steel, organ and strings of her eighth album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, approaches country territory. The narrative style of the lyrics – and a mention of Death “moseying” away – suggests that living in Nashville may have rubbed off on her.

This is present from opening song ‘In a Lake’, a twangy treatise on...

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Eiko Ishibashi performing at Rewire 2024, photo by Alicia Karsonopoero

Rewire has added a third wave of acts to the bill for its 2026 edition.

Taking place across multiple venues in The Hague, the festival will now feature a special performance of Moritz von Oswald's vocal piece Silencio with help from The Hague Vocal Ensemble, while Moor Mother and Jamal Moss, otherwise known as Hieroglyphic Being, will join forces as Immaculate Deception Of History.

Other additions to the lineup include By Storm; The Bug & Dis Fig; Valentina Magaletti & YPY; Leila Bordreuil; Nazar; Colleen; and a back-to-back DJ set from Kode9 and Deena Abdelwahed.

They all join the previously announced likes of Kim Gordon, Blawan, Armand Hammer,...

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Thekla in Bristol is one of Everywhere At Once's participating venues

The Music Venue Trust has partnered with The National Lottery to launch a new nationwide music festival project aimed at supporting grassroots music venues.

Everywhere At Once, spread out across the final June weekend on which Glastonbury would usually take place, will see music venues up and down the UK put on a series of special gigs, covering major artists, touring acts and emerging local talent. The project has also been launched with the support of pressure groups Save Our Scene and Association of Independent Promoters.

In...

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“She's not the slightest bit squeamish about a bit of claret.” Outside my penthouse flat, a gang of mercenaries are squabbling about how to kidnap my son. As I get to the window, I see them shoot my wife and snatch the kid before bundling into a red Jensen Interceptor. My wife dies into my arms, gasping a dying request: “Get our son back.” Fight and flight fuse together and I jump into my green Alfa Romeo, in hot pursuit of the Jensen. Pumping techno soundtracks the chase, sounding for all the world as if Luke Slater...

The post The Low Culture Essay: Kyle MacNeill on The Getaway  appeared first on The Quietus.

The Ex live, by Susana Martens

Acid Horse 26 is a three day, two stage music festival held on 22 to 24 May in the beautiful Barge Inn, next to a canal in Wiltshire

This Spring Bank Holiday weekend – 22 to 24 May – will be lit up by the fourth consecutive edition of Acid Horse, which for a music festival – certainly a small DIY affair for discerning trippers, like this one – is the...

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Credit: Senny Mau

In life and art, strong emotional reactions and restraint are frequently placed at odds with one another. A decade that has felt unmoored at best and marked by upheaval – dotted with climate events that have wrought havoc on different locales and been quickly forgotten – has inspired plenty of bold artistic responses. For Maria BC, an artist whose work has covered dark folk and goth territory and who has explored the potential of different electronic elements, the impulse to respond to these environmental pressures by being louder, denser, more aggressive would seem...

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Dejeuner Sous L’Herbe

Blurt's punk poet Ted Milton teams up with Sam Britton for some linguistic détournement, backed by tense electronics

Déjeuner Sous L'Herbe by The Odes

Dejeuner Sous L’Herbe, The Odes’ new release, is a crazy, underground and slightly hellish poetic collage by the revered Ted Milton of Blurt and co-conspirator Sam Britton (aka Isambard Khroustaliov). Milton, who has rubbed shoulders with none other than William S. Burroughs as well as Eric Clapton, pours no wave punk agitation into about 35 minutes and 43 tracks of dadaist linguistic abstraction. The release is presented as two halves: part one music, part two isolated voice.

Édouard Manet’s painting, Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe is flipped on its head on The Odes’ album cover artwork and...

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Photo by Donald Milne

Squarepusher is releasing a new album this spring.

Comprised of 14 tracks, Kammerkonzert is Tom Jenkinson's 21st studio LP under the pseudonym, and combines elements of orchestral music with experimental electronic sounds. The record's title translates from German to English as 'chamber concert'.

This is Squarepusher's first album release since 2024's Dostrotime, and it's led by the single 'K2 Central', which you can listen to below.

Warp Records will release Kammerkonzert on 10 April 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAvdRtOdRcM

...

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Photo by Anthony Harrison

WU LYF have shared details of their second studio album, A Wave That Will Never Break.

The band's follow-up to 2011's Go Tell Fire To The Mountain features seven tracks and its announcement comes after they reunited for a series of live shows in 2025. Those gigs were the group's first in 13 years having split in late 2012.

WU LYF are planning to release the album, which was produced by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, through their L Y F community, according to a press release, and it will not be made available on any major streaming platforms.

In a statement, the band said: "The vision for...

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Photo by Robin Maddock

Can's Irmin Schmidt has a new solo album on the way, titled Requiem.

Split into two parts that clock in together at 41 minutes, the LP sees 89-year-old Schmidt play prepared and unprepared piano alongside environmental field recordings captured in the surroundings of his home in Southern France.

After feeling compelled to record the sounds of a nightingale singing in his garden, Schmidt went on to build up an archive of further sounds, covering water, birds and frog noises. The piano-playing that appears on the record was spontaneous and edited at a later date, with the help of long-time collaborator René...

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Portrait via Bandcamp

Only a handful of people aged over 25 could honestly say they grew up with the music of groundbreaking French composer Éliane Radigue. Her work was largely unreleased or unknown until this century, so the scale and warmth of the reaction to her death on Monday can’t be attributed to nostalgia, though it is what you’d expect on the passing of a long-loved artist. Instead, this widespread love for Radigue and the impact she has had on so many listeners and artists is a phenomenon that...

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Oda

Sampling and synthesizing sounds both uncannily familiar and eerily strange, Argentine artist Victoria Barca has made a sinuous ode to small things

Oda by vic bang

How and where we listen to music is hugely important. I would venture to say that it often has a significant impact on how we perceive it. I listen to Oda by Argentine artist Vic Bang in my aunt’s temporary flat, where I am staying now. In one room, a huge carpet several metres long lies on the floor, while in the next, the walls are lined with panelling. I feel a bit like I’m in a Kashubian cottage on holiday by the lake in the 1990s, while on the other hand, it feels like a variation...

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Just when you think you know everything there is to know about the guitar, here comes Shane Parish to show that you are mistaken. This can be heard on both acoustic and electric instruments; in brilliant recordings made with the Bill Orcutt Quartet and Ahleuchatistas; playing his own music and interpreting shanties and songs by Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, and Autechre, as exemplified by his latest album, Autechre Guitar, released by Palilalia Records this week.

Since his first serious band, the Union Prayer...

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You can't spell mental transformation without MENT. Shot by Lenart Lukšič

Good luck, frankly, to any algorithm that attempts to recommend music to me after analysing complex brain data from me during MENT festival. Over four nights my auditory cortex finds itself tickled and shaken by Turkish psych, sludgy doom metal, clattering techno, chaotic glitchcore, a tin whistle and a hurdy gurdy. This festival in Ljubljana – now in its 12th year – includes the folksy and the far out, guiding its international crowd of punters and...

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Éliane Radigue, the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète, has died at the age of 94.

INA GRM, the Paris-based experimental music institute, broke the news on social media, writing: "It's with immense sadness that we learn of the passing of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94. A major figure in musical creation has left us. She pursued an exciting musical life, moving from electroacoustic feedback to electronic music (with the help of her inseparable ARP 2500) and finally reinventing herself through fruitful collaborations with numerous instrumentalists."

No cause of death has been disclosed.

Widely under-recognised during her younger years, Radigue's extensive catalogue of work gained significantly more acknowledgement in her later life via a...

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Let Us Clap

A bracing burst of African Futurism from the Ghanaian powerhouse, Lamisi

Let Us Clap by Lamisi

To truly grasp the weight of Let Us Clap, you have to first feel the vibration of the road. It’s a 15-hour haul from the humid, neon-flecked sprawl of Accra up to the arid stretches of Zebilla in the Upper East Region. This is a journey that sheds the slickness of the capital, trading the high-life gloss for themes of grassy savannah and the sharp, percussive reality of the Kusasi people. In Zebilla, clapping isn’t just a gesture of polite approval; it’s more of a communal language, a complex architecture of palms striking palms that defines the rhythm of the day. Lamisi, a powerhouse...

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Callanish Audio Visual Research

Julian Marszalek considers an eye-opening multi-media project of film, soundtrack and book which found its genesis in a 5,000-year-old stone circle in the Outer Hebrides

Callanish Audio Visual Research OST + Film Access by Demian Castellanos

For many of a certain vintage – this writer included – any contemporary fascination with ancient stone circles and ritual landscapes owes less to academic / archaeological study than it does to the children’s television shows of the 1970s that were steeped in lithic terror. The obvious and oft-mentioned touchstone today is the 1977 ITV series Children Of The Stones, a seven-part drama set in a village encircled by ancient megaliths where something is palpably and profoundly wrong.

But Children...

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Nondi_

I recently interviewed Slovenian DJ and promoter Lottie for a Slovenian magazine who discussed the idea of throwing club nights without lineup reveals, how exciting it would be to go out without knowing what you’ll get, simply trusting the process. For over a decade, as long as I have been actively involved in the local club scene, this has only happened to me on one, maybe two occasions. Maybe it’s more common elsewhere, but here in Ljubljana, even if you run an in-demand night with hardcore devotees it is practically impossible, even preposterous to expect...

The post Hyperspecific: Electronic Music for February Reviewed by Jaša Bužinel appeared first on The Quietus.

Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper

Chicago cellist Ishmael Ali challenges the jazz format with a dense, multilayered debut

Burn The Plastic, Sell The Copper by Ishmael Ali

There are not many cellists like Ishmael Ali. A musician who not only handles the cello but also plays guitar, moving effortlessly between rhythm-driven collective music, experimental electronics, and song-based forms. He is known from widely different contexts: as a guitarist in the genre-blending dance band Je’raf, as a cellist in Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and as a provider of rough, bow-scraped sound fragments in Hearsay’s tightly woven whirl of beats and turntablism.

Now Ali debuts under his own name with Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper – an album that on first listen may...

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Photo by Alexa Viscius

Low's Alan Sparhawk has released two new songs, titled 'JCMF' and 'No More Darkness'.

They mark the first release of solo material from the US artist since he put out his album White Roses, My God in September 2024. Both songs feature Sparhawk on guitar and vocals, with help from Eric Pollard on drums and Alan's son Cyrus on bass.

Speaking about 'JCMF', the elder Sparhawk said: "This is a song I've had for a few years, but couldn't find the right way to play or record it. We started playing it last year in the Alan Sparhawk Solo Band, on tour, and with each month, the sentiment...

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Portrait by David Brookes

Time is a Succession of Such Shapes by LOULA YORKE

Loula Yorke is a fixture in leftfield electronic music now. She’s one of those artists whose name is a watchword for a very particular sound. In her case this means oneiric, immersive patterns created on a modular synthesiser, often blended with field recordings that have a pastoral sensibility – a feeling which she calls luminous. Her music sits somewhere adjacent to the very...

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Street Druid

Premium sax honker Ben Vince is bringing sexy back in 2026 (sort of), says Bernie Brooks

Street Druid by Ben Vince

It’s hard to feel sexy these days.

2025 was screeching tinnitus all the time, was a tsunami-warning klaxon every five minutes. 2026 is workmen sawing through the pavement just outside your window at five in the morning, except that five AM feeling lasts all day. 2026 is cinema zombies clacking and grinding their teeth. The clacking is in your right ear, the grinding in your left. Constantly. That’s not sexy. That’s not sexy at all.

With his new LP Street Druid in tow, premium sax honker Ben Vince is here to help bring sexy back in 2026. Well, sort of. And...

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Raincoats, 1981, photo by Shirley O'Loughlin

Audrey Golden opens Shouting Out Loud by rejecting a premise most biographers accept without question: that any single account can claim definitiveness. Her methodology instead builds toward something more useful: a history constructed from voices that standard rock narratives systematically exclude. The result demonstrates what becomes visible when you start listening to people who were actually there, but who were never asked.

This approach was first developed in her earlier book on Factory Records. While researching I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records, Golden found that women...

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A few years ago, the Guardian’s ‘Notes and Queries’ section posed the question, "Who is the least influential band ever?" I remember only one of the suggested answers – Frankie Goes To Hollywood – but the question has resonated with me ever since. It provides a useful reminder that commercial and/or artistic success do not necessarily mean that anyone follows in your footsteps.

I am not going to claim that Sepultura’s Roots influenced no one, but in revisiting the album 30 years after its release, I found pinning down its impact much more challenging than I...

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There’s a particular moment in an artist’s life when experience finally catches up with ambition — when the years of work, mistakes, refinement and persistence begin to cohere into something deeper than momentum. It’s the sense of having gathered your forces, learned enough about your craft, and lived enough life to finally say something with clarity. Listening to Hell Hath No Fury in 2026, nearly twenty years after its release, that feeling becomes impossible to ignore. What once sounded urgent and confrontational now sounds assured – not because the record has changed,...

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There were arses everywhere. Male and female arses alike, pale against the green paint of the metal fence that darkened with urine, or sticking out from behind swamped portaloos and food stalls, pissing into the municipal grass. The bogs were overwhelmed but so were the bars that fuelled them, staff facing epic queues of angry punters who got to the front only to be told the booze had run out....

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