Peplo have been promising us new music, a debut album no less for ages now, so new single ‘For His Better Three Quarters’ arrives with a flurry of confetti and popping of corks from me. The Glasgow based indie pop quartet have been building toward their debut album We’re Not Getting Out of Here for a good while now, and they’re ready to let us have a listen.
The band are Mark Hinds on drums, Daniel Young on bass, Cit Lennox on vocals and Iain O’Donnell on guitar, with Cit and Iain forming the songwriting partnership at the centre of the group. With airplay already coming through BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Introducing on BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio nan Gàidheal, Amazing Radio and beyond, plus past appearances at Celtic Connections, Hidden Door and ButeFest, Peplo are arriving at this album campaign with a fair bit of groundwork already behind them. I first discovered the band as they played a support slot in Glasgow’s infamous 13th Note. I hadn’t heard anything like them and was immediately drawn to that, uniqueness for want of a better word. So, what have they been up to since then. O’Donnell fills us in.
“We are entirely DIY and we’ve self-financed our debut album We’re Not Getting Out of Here. We’ll drop the album with vinyl and CD towards the end of 2026 after a series of single releases. We’ve been recording, mixing, and mastering this record for a few years now – so to finally be in a position where we are happy with the end result, and in a position to release it, is probably our biggest success to date.”
Recorded at Chem19 Studios by Jamie Savage and mastered by Paul Savage, the single comes with a strong Scottish studio lineage behind it, with names linked to The Twilight Sad, King Creosote, Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai and Arab Strap sitting close to the recording process. You can sense why Peplo would want that level of care around the first single from a record they have lived with for years.
The title has that peculiar Peplo charm too. ‘For His Better Three Quarters’ has a conversational oddness to it, the kind of phrase that makes you want to hit play. It suggests affection, imbalance, loyalty and a quiet joke shared at close range. The song opens with a slow build, giving the guitars room to glow before the rhythm section starts to tighten its grip. O’Donnell’s guitar has a glossy, dreamy tone that sits beautifully against the steadier weight of Daniel Young’s bass and Mark Hinds’ drums. When that chorus arrives, the song lifts with real confidence. Lennox sings with force and feeling, and their Scots accent cuts clean through the arrangement in a way that gives the song its emotional identity. The vocal does a lot of the heavy work here. It brings warmth, bite and a sense of lived experience, while the guitars open out around it with a sheen that suits the song’s indie pop heart. You catch little flourishes tucked into the sides, the kind of bright, literate melodic touches that bring Aztec Camera in their prime to mind.
As the first step toward, We’re Not Getting Out of Here, ‘For His Better Three Quarters’ does exactly what a strong lead single should do. It gives you the band’s sense of humour, their independence, their melodic instinct and their belief in the album waiting behind it. Peplo have clearly taken the long route to this point, and that suits them. The song feels considered, personal and ready to be heard. If the album follows through on the promise here, Peplo may already have given us the better three quarters of the story.
‘For His Better Three Quarters’ is out now. You can check it out now on the Peplo Bandcamp page.
Regular readers will remember I came away from Bugland thinking No Joy had reached one of those rare points where the music could go almost anywhere. Jasamine White Gluz stretched the No Joy sound into stranger places on that record without losing the melodic edge that first drew so many of us in. It was a perfect balance of shoegaze, electronica and pop. Who knew she had more of that secret blend up her sleeve.
New single and title track of her new EP ‘Big Life, Big Leaf’ feels like a welcome next step. Released via Sonic Cathedral, the single brings Jasamine back together with Jorge Elbrecht, who has been part of the No Joy story before, and Angel Marcloid, also known as Fire Toolz, who produced Bugland. Speaking about the feeling behind the track, White Gluz says,
“I was exploring the boundless pain one feels when it is time to say goodbye to someone or something. To mourn is also to celebrate.”
That last line sits right at the heart of the EP. Let’s give the title track a spin.
‘Big Life, Big Leaf’ starts with that familiar No Joy sensation where the sound seems to glow. The opening has a glossy, almost unreal brightness to it, with the production giving the track a soft halo. The melody feels immediate, small electronic flickers appear and the drums push the song forward with a clean snap. The guitars are a big part of why the track works so well. Tara McLeod brings a crunchy heavy tone into the mix, and those guitar parts stop the song from becoming too airy. They cut through the brighter surface and give the track a bit of grit. The vocal performance is one of the strongest parts of the track for me. She sounds present, direct and up front which suits the lyric beautifully.
What I really like about ‘Big Life, Big Leaf’ is its energy. The track moves. It glows. It has bounce in the drums and shine in those electronic touches. As a piece connected to the Bugland period, the single makes a lot of sense. It shares that same curiosity about sound, with shoegaze, pop and electronic detail feeding into each other. It also feels a little more direct, as if the song has stepped out of the undergrowth with its colours showing. The title gives you a clue as well to be fair lol. With this one, No Joy turn over a new leaf and make it feel massive.
‘Big Life, Big Leaf’ is out now via Sonic Cathedral. You can check it out over on the No Joy Bandcamp page.
Nick Raybould is one of those people I always enjoy hearing from, partly because he has excellent timing and partly because he always has new music to share. He consistently reaches out to me way ahead of release date, usually with a new Thought Bubble record tucked under his arm and a gentle nudge in my direction. This time, life got in the way. I have been so busy that I am only getting to Dark Shapes now, which feels slightly ridiculous given that this EP contains, to these ears, the best Thought Bubble song to date. I have written about this band a few times now, and every release seems to arrive with a fresh angle on what Chris Cordwell, Peter Gelf and Nick Raybould can do together. Earlier this year, Who’s To Say felt like Thought Bubble getting some speed up, finding real confidence in this version of the band. Dark Shapes?Well, it just runs.
That is the thing about Thought Bubble. They are prolific, yes, and that can sometimes make you worry that ideas might start arriving faster than they can be shaped. With this lot, the opposite keeps happening. The records feel like they are talking to one another, with each new release picking up a thread from the last one and taking it somewhere slightly stranger. Who’s To Say had that broader, more reflective quality, with songs stretching out and letting modern life, frustration, memory and absurdity seep into the music. This EP sounds like a band levelling up because the writing feels sharper, the grooves hit harder, and the electronic and live elements now feel completely natural together. Thought Bubble have always had ideas. Here, those ideas arrive pinpoint precision.
I am going to call it early. Opening track ‘A Complicated Place’ is the finest thing Thought Bubble have released so far. There. I’ve said it.
It opens with out-there synth work that gets right under the skin in the first few seconds. Bright psychedelic shimmers curling around a rhythm that is just so tight. The beat has real groove to it, but the song still carries that odd Thought Bubble character where everything feels slightly sideways. You can get up and dance to it, you can sit and pick through all the small details, whatever you choose that main hook is taking up residence in your head for the rest of the day. Gelf’s vocal works beautifully here because he does not overplay it. He lets the melody do the work. I kept going back to this one before moving through the rest of the EP, which is always a good sign and a slight problem when you are meant to be reviewing the full thing. For a band that have already put plenty of good stuff out into the world, this one feels like a proper marker.
‘Enemies’ follows with guitarist Shaun Bailey joining Thought Bubble, and it brings a different kind of focus. Where ‘A Complicated Place’ beams out in bright pulses, ‘Enemies’ settles into a moodier groove and gives Gelf’s voice more room to carry the song. There is a poppier shape to it, especially in the way the chorus gives you something firmer to hold on to, but the track still has that steady krautrock movement underneath. What I really like here is the way the lyric seems to take the track somewhere darker while the rhythm keeps moving with a dancefloor in mind. Your foot wants to follow the groove, then the words start needling away at you.
By the time ‘Waiting On The Kill’ arrives, the band sound like they are having a wee grin to themselves. This is the most playful track on Dark Shapes, with an itchy glitchy electronic feel that made me think of an arcade machine developing its own personality after hours. The synth tones are bright and cheeky, the rhythm has a lovely swing and indeed spring in it, uch the whole arrangement feels like it is constantly twitching with ideas. Whilst the title gives it a darker edge, the track itself skips along with manic energy. It keeps adding little flashes and rhythmic nudges, enough to keep you smiling and slightly suspicious at the same time.
‘Forgotten Worlds’ is exactly the comedown the EP needs. After three tracks built around movement, pulse and that increasingly confident Thought Bubble bounce, the closing piece opens the space out and lets Gelf’s voice carry more of the emotional weight. I’ve said it before, there’s a Bowie like quality to his delivery, especially in the way the vocal sits with a little theatrical lift while the electronics stretch out. The sounds around the vocal feel calmer, more reflective, and the final stretch gives you time to come down from the brighter energy of the earlier tracks.
What I take from Dark Shapes is that this feels like the band have found their new MO. That might sound simple, but with Thought Bubble it feels like the real story. They have always had that mix of electronic curiosity, psychedelic instinct and lyrical oddness, but this EP makes those parts feel cleaner and more connected. ‘A Complicated Place’ is the big leap forward, and I would happily point anyone new to the band straight there. Around it, the other three tracks show different sides of the same growth. For a band who only released Who’s To Say earlier this year, this feels like a strong return rather than a quick follow up. Nick was right to send it early. I might be late getting to it, but Thought Bubble have arrived exactly where they need to. Dark Shapes finds them stepping out of the shadows with their sharpest shapes yet.
Dark Shapes is out now. You can check it out over on the Thought Bubble Bandcamp page.
You can follow Thought Bubble on social media here…
Velveteen have been regulars on my turntable for a few years now. I had one of those proper fixations with Empty Crush when it came out in 2022. It had that mixture I always fall for, insane gazey guitars, vocals tucked into the noise, and songs with a nineties sheen. The band are back with their new EP My Dreams Are Changing and I’m getting ready to obsess again.
Lets’ rewind for minute in case this is a new band for you. Velveteen are Drew Younger on guitars and vocals, David Thomson on guitars, Patrick Malins on bass and James Nolan on drums and vocals. Across earlier releases Bluest Sunshine in 2020 and Empty Crush in 2022, they worked their way into a sound where shoegaze, noise rock, dream pop and post punk all shared the same grooves on their records. After a brief time away from the scene, they returned to the studio in last year and came back with My Dreams Are Changing, a six track EP. Written and recorded collectively by the band, it feels like a record made by four people who worship at the altar of gaze. Let’s drop the needle and soak in the beautiful noise.
The title track, ‘My Dreams Are Changing’, opens the EP with guitars that arrive with real impact. They do that glorious shoegaze thing where the chords seem to bloom and continue to evolve and grow, filling the room. The vocals sit deep in the mix, less a lead line above the band and more a figure half seen through moving distortion. As it should be. Malins keeps the low end steady, giving the song a spine while the guitars stretch outward. Nolan’s drumming has enough force to push through the haze without flattening the feeling around it. As an opener, it sets out the EP’s whole intent with confidence.
‘Shoot Me Down’ comes in with a sharper noise rock bite at the front of the song. The guitars feel more serrated here, less washed out and more intent on leaving marks. There is a wiry poppy early MBV quality in the way the guitar strings seem to counter the rhythm, as if the song is trying to shake itself loose while the drums keep it locked in and on target. The vocal is more prominent here and the song really benefits from it. The have a great ear for a pop song but still are able to swathe it in noise.
By the time ‘Another Somewhere’ arrives, the EP opens out into its longest piece, and the extra space suits them. It allows the band to really build that feeling of, oh I don’t know how to describe it. It’s that comfort you feel in the overwhelm, swathed in the wall of sound. I love the high-end trilling going on, reminds me of Pinkshinyultrablast in places. (High praise indeed). This is without doubt my stand out track and for that matter, one the best songs I’ve heard this year.
Up next ‘A Fool’s Paradise’ brings spoken word to the party. The guitars sound like a rushing waterfall. They absolutely pummel the senses. The gentleness of the poetry contrasts beautifully against it, like the light glinting on the spray. The bass has an almost metallic flavour at times which cuts through and gives your ear another texture to enjoy.
‘Unanswered’ sits in the aftermath of that rush and band turn to another influence. They reference Robin Guthries guitar and Simon Raymondes bass playing beautifully. It’s so great to hear that sound in a new setting. The vocal hook in this one is dynamite and grabs me every time. The closing section changes things up and leaves us wanting more.
The closing track, ‘Untitled 103’, gives very little away from its name, which makes it a neat ending for a record so concerned with buried feeling and shifting shapes. The guitars are thick enough to feel almost physical, yet little melodic fragments keep appearing through the crush. The drums give the piece a final sense of lift, while the bass keeps it from floating away into pure noise. It pulses along steadily almost like the band are floating out to sea from shore on gentle waves of distortion.
By the end of My Dreams Are Changing, I’m right back in that familiar Velveteen headspace and the whole thing makes me want to flip the record over as soon as it ends. Sure, this EP carries the DNA of Empty Crush, with those huge gazey guitars, buried vocals and nineties glow still firmly in place, yet there is a stronger sense of purpose running through these six songs. ‘Another Somewhere’ gives us the big centrepiece, ‘A Fool’s Paradise’ brings spoken word and beautiful sensory overload, and ‘Unanswered’ nods lovingly towards the dreamier end of the shoegaze family tree. Velveteen have returned with a record that feels physical, loud, strangely tender and completely ready to take over your turntable. I was getting ready to obsess again at the start of this EP, and by the end those dreams had changed into plans.
Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Marina Yozora live in Glasgow. She was playing alongside Selkie, another artist who has already found a home in these pages, and the whole night had that rare hush you get when a room decides, all at once, to truly listen. Marina had the audience in the palm of her hand. Between songs she spoke with such warmth, care and natural storytelling instinct that the gig felt like hanging out with a friend.
That show stayed with me for a lot of reasons, but hearing ‘Snow Heat’ in that room was the moment that has kept circling back. I had written about Marina before, most recently through the soft emotional charge of ‘Daffodils’, and what struck me at The Old Hairdresser’s was how far she has travelled as a songwriter and performer.
For those new to her music Marina Yozora is a London based dream pop and shoegaze singer songwriter whose music carries the history of a life lived across several continents. Born in Japan, raised across Tokyo, Houston and Ho Chi Minh City, and now based in London, she brings that sense of emotional geography into her writing. Previous singles including ‘Watermelon Pink Blue Skies’, ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Touché’ have already brought support from a multitude of blogs and radio stations. She has performed in London, Glasgow, Leicester, Rome, Lisbon and Tokyo, with a sold-out Tokyo headline show and a sold-out London headline during Independent Venue Week 2026 marking clear steps in a growing international story.
With her new single ‘Snow Heat’, Yozora moves into a fuller shoegaze shape. It marks a clear expansion of her sound. She describes the song in her own words with real care.
“This is a very powerful song, both lyrically and sonically. It was a song inspired by a flashback memory I had when I met someone briefly and felt something strong that I cannot word well. It lingered in me like an illusion. The song is about a strong feeling I flashed back to, rather than a story. And I wanted listeners to first experience that tension in their own way, without too much visual direction.”
That idea of a flashback sits right at the centre of ‘Snow Heat’. The track opens with the feeling of something already half remembered. The guitars do not rush towards you. They gather around the voice, thick with reverb, carrying a cold brightness that fits the title perfectly. As the full band arrangement takes hold, ‘Snow Heat’ becomes more than a memory piece. The drums give it pulse and forward motion, while the bass brings a grounded heaviness beneath the shimmer. That pairing is key to why the song works so well. The top end glows and blurs, but underneath it there is a strong body to the sound. The guitars have that reverb-soaked wash you want from shoegaze, but they also carry melodic intent. They do not simply fill the space. They shape the feeling of the track, rising around the vocal like something remembered too vividly to ignore.
There are planned alternate versions going to be released which is an inspired way to let the song keep changing shape. A stripped back solo rendition, an acoustic version, and a string session with violin and cello should all draw different details from the composition. You can already hear how well ‘Snow Heat’ will translate across those settings. Beneath the shoegaze weight, there is a strong song at the centre. That was clear in Glasgow too. Even in a live room, surrounded by the particular charge of a shared evening, the track had bones, heart and atmosphere in equal measure.
‘Snow Heat’ feels like an important step for Yozora. It gives her music more scale while keeping the emotional intimacy that made her earlier releases connect. It also confirms what that Glasgow gig made plain. Marina is a rare kind of performer, someone who can speak to a room with humour and openness, then turn that same room silent with a song. This single carries that same gift. It lets a brief connection become something larger, stranger and more lasting. Some memories fade politely. ‘Snow Heat’ glows through the frost.
It doesn’t seem that long since I was first discovering the sonic attack of thistle. I had heard them via a pal over on the ‘gram, clicked through to it’s nice to see you, stranger, and very quickly ended up in that glorious mess of fuzz, grunge scuff and heavy gaze weight. Now they return with Backflip and it feels like the next page of the same slightly battered notebook.
If thistle is a new name to you, let me get you caught up. The band are Cameron Godfrey, Carey Judwyn Rushton and Lewis O’Grady. Based in Northampton they met in school and have been getting their sound out there via home recording, full time work, life stuff, and that very particular young band madness. Their sound has drawn comparisons with shoegaze, indie rock, hardcore, Pavement, Polachek, Ovlov, DIIV and a whole load of noise loving oddness. Backflip sounds like a band still moving and finding their sound among the noise.
Let’s drop the needle and explore this new EP.
‘pieces’ opens the EP with impact. The guitars arrive with grit under the fingernails, all rough edges and pressure, while the rhythm section gives the whole thing a restless forward shove. They utilise the loud quite loud dynamic really well here. With acoustic guitar deployed on verses to give that contrast. It’s a hooky number for sure but is still off kilter enough to keep you paying attention. You can check this track out on my June DKFM Shoegaze Radio Show.
‘pylon’ tightens the frame and lets the band’s angular side come forward. You can hear the live band brain at work here, with the parts locking together in a way that suggests they have recorded this one live in one take. The vocal tone carries that familiar mix of bruised melody and deadpan nerve, while the drums keep the track snapping at your heels. It feels compact, wired, and full of little jolts.
The tiny title piece ‘backflip in slow motion’ sits right in the middle of the EP like a strange little memory fragment. It could’ve been a throwaway in less interesting hands, but not these guys. These wee nuggets I love.
Previous single ‘tied’ comes in with the feeling of a song that has been wound up too tightly and released at exactly the right moment. The frantic clarity is refreshing, with guitars pushing against the vocal line and the drums driving the whole thing on relentlessly. I’ve loved this one since I was lucky enough to grab a copy on seven-inch. It’s the perfect punk gaze single and will have you coming back for repeated listens.
‘mean eye’ delves into their Sonic Youth influence and kit fair suits them. The guitars feel more needling here, less like a wall of sound and more like something picking away at the edge of your attention. The rhythm section gives it a wiry bounce, which brings that Pavement leaning indie thread closer to the front without sanding down the heavier instinct’s underneath. It’s the slacker vocal approach that really pays dividends. This is a band happy to experiment.
By the time ‘city, name’ arrives, Backflip has already shown you a lot of different angles, and the closing track pulls those angles into something that feels more reflective. This is a fun new direction for them. The almost dreampop verses soon evolve from the punctuating bass and guitar harmonics into the sonic sweep of wild guitars and doomy bass. The length and breadth of this band’s creativity is amazing.
Backflip feels like another step forward from a band who sounded ready to grow the last time I wrote about them. It keeps the heavy gaze weight, the low fidelity grit, the hardcore aftertaste and the indie rock wonk, then folds them into a shorter, stranger, more concentrated set of songs. What I like most is that thistle. still sound like three friends who are totally on the same page as each other. You can hear the scrapes, the odd turns, the sudden flashes of melody, and the refusal to make everything too neat. For a band this young, they already understand that the rough parts can carry just as much feeling as the pretty parts. Backflip lands with both feet on the floor, then immediately looks tempted to try the move again.
When I first wrote about Slift, I was still trying to make sense of how three people could make that insane sound. A friend had pointed me towards their KEXP session from Trans Musicales in Rennes, and from there I fell headlong into their back catalogue. By the time Ilion arrived, I was already waiting to see how far Jean Fossat, Rémi Fossat and Canek Flores could stretch their heavy psych universe. That record felt enormous. It asked for time, patience and a decent set of speakers. It was Slift operating at full mythic scale, with riffs, saxophone, electronics, doom weight and space rock excess all pulling together until you felt slightly rearranged by the end of it. Now comes Fantasia, the band’s new album, and it feels like a fascinating next move. Slift have kept the force, the imagination and the sense of cosmic threat, but this time the songs are leaner, sharper and more direct in their intent.
That change in shape makes sense when you look at where the band are standing in 2026. Jean and Rémi Fossat are brothers, while Canek Flores has been with them since their school days, making this a trio with ten years of shared instinct behind them. You can hear that history in the way they move as one unit. Fantasia was built differently from the long form sprawl of Ilion, with Jean bringing clearer song ideas into the rehearsal room before the band took them into the studio to record. There is still plenty here for those of us who want Slift to open a hole in the ceiling, but the playing now feels clipped, driven and aimed at something real. The record is also shaped by Jorge Luis Borges, political unease, false idols, xenophobia, corruption and the belief that people can still rise against the systems pressing down on them. Jean Fossat gives that belief its clearest spark on the opening track when he sings of finding “a fire for your soul.” That line feels like the key to the whole album.
‘Fantasia’ opens the record with Slift doing what Slift do best, making the first few seconds feel like the beginning of a transmission from somewhere beyond the edge of the map. A low throb starts to gather, the synths flicker around the edges, then the band begin to build with patience and bite. Jeans vocal still has that edge and his guitar has that familiar scorched quality, Rémi’s bass is thick and restless, and Flores keeps the whole thing moving with a sense of control that keeps the heavier passages from spilling everywhere. This sounds like the theme song for a dystopian sci fi movie and it carries a clear message. The world is burning; people are frightened and Slift are asking what kind of force we can still summon together. What an opener.
‘Corrupted Sky’ tightens the grip almost immediately. The rhythm section comes in with a hard, almost post punk pulse, while the synths bring a colder colour to the track. There is a sense of movement here that feels very different from the longer waves of Ilion. This one drives through the streets of the imagined town at speed, past figures of power and suspicion, past people who have learned to look at strangers as threats. Rémi’s bass gives the track its engine, growling with enough grit to keep the guitars from lifting too far away from the ground. Jean’s guitar solo then tears through the middle with a real chase scene quality. It swerves, climbs, burns and keeps moving forward. Slift still sound like a band with space rock in their bloodstream, but ‘Corrupted Sky’ proves they can compress that scale into something more urgent without losing their identity.
The album’s uneasy atmosphere deepens next with ‘The Village’. This is where Fantasia starts to feel like a place with rules, rituals and people watching from behind closed doors. The immigrant is treated as a threat, and the music mirrors that suspicion beautifully. The guitars have a clenched feel, the drums keep circling the track’s nervous energy, and the vocal sits inside the noise like someone trying to push back against a crowd that has already made up its mind. There are still flashes of prog complexity in the way the parts interlock, but the song never feels showy. Slift use those twists to create unease rather than to prove how many ideas they can fit into one track. By the closing stretch, the whole thing feels like a warning shouted across a town square as the sky starts to darken.
There is a swagger to ‘A Storm of Wings’ that makes it one of the album’s most immediate moments. The riff has a physical snap to it, almost like a heavy festival chant dragged through fuzz and smoke. Then the band start adding layers of weight until the track becomes a full body surge. Flores is brilliant here, giving the song both swing and force, while Rémi’s bass keeps leaning into the groove with real bite. Jean’s vocal feels more defiant than desperate. The references sitting behind the song may reach toward jazz and literature, but what comes through in the speakers is the sense of a crowd beginning to move together. After the fear and suspicion of ‘The Village’, this feels like the first sign that something larger is coming. You can almost hear doors opening.
‘Orbis Tertius’ sends the album into stranger territory. The title reaches back to Borges, and the music carries that sense of a reality being rewritten by the people who control the story. The drums begin with a ritual feel, the bass sits low and tense, and the guitars rise in sheets of heat. Slift have always understood repetition as a living thing. They can sit inside a pattern and keep making it change through pressure, tone and attack. That is exactly what happens here. The track seems to keep turning the same object over in its hands, finding a different surface each time. The people inside Fantasia are beginning to see that the version of the world they have been given is built on fear, habit and obedience.
Then ‘Waiting Man’ arrives and gives the record its most vulnerable turn. After all that force, it is striking to hear Slift leave more room around the voice. The song has the weight of a psychedelic ballad, with a slow burn feel that lets the emotional centre come forward. Jean sings, “I waited for love, waited my time,” and the line lands with a plain sadness that feels new for this band. His voice sounds worn, human and close to breaking in places. The guitars still glow at the edges, and the low end still has that Sabbath rooted heaviness, but the track is built around a realisation. It is the point where the narrator understands that the world he trusted has failed him. On an album full of scale and political charge, this is the moment that feels most intimate.
‘The Day of Execution’ pulls the record back into motion with a heavier charge. If ‘Waiting Man’ is the breath before the decision, this track is the decision itself. The guitars coil and lash out, the drums push forward with real force, and Rémi’s bass sounds like it is dragging sparks from the floor. The difference is in the shape. The song keeps its focus. It does not wander off into the far distance. It keeps returning to the core feeling of confrontation, as though the whole album has been moving towards a point where fear gives way to action.
‘Secret Mirror’ closes Fantasia with a wide, reflective sweep. The synths open the space beautifully, creating a sense of standing in the aftermath of something heavy and looking around at what has changed. Slift allow this track to build with patience, letting the atmosphere gather before the heavier passages arrive. Jean’s guitar feels less like a weapon here and more like a searching light. Flores keeps the movement steady, while Rémi adds low end weight without crowding the arrangement. It is a brilliant closer because it avoids easy comfort. The album has spent its time asking how people respond to corruption, fear, control and cruelty, and ‘Secret Mirror’ leaves the question facing back at you. What do you see when the noise settles? What have you accepted? What are you ready to resist?
Fantasia is a thrilling continuation of the Slift story because it answers Ilion without trying to repeat it. The last record opened up vast mythic spaces and asked you to give yourself over to the trip. This one brings the danger closer to home. It still has the riffs, the synth glow, the thunderous rhythm section and the sense that Slift are capable of making a room feel too small for the sound inside it. It also has a clearer human pulse. These songs are about people trapped inside broken systems, people remembering their own strength, and people finding the courage to push back together. Slift remain sonic explorers, but on Fantasia they have aimed the telescope back at the world we are living in, and the view is fierce, strange and worth facing. Will you stand?
Fantasia is out June 5th via Sub Pop. You can check it out over on the Slift Bandcamp page.
When Alessio Ferrari first turned up on these pages through 2024’s Mount Elephant, delivered courtesy of one of those much-appreciated Fuzz Club parcels, his Upupayāma project felt like journey into another world. The Italian multi-instrumentalist had built six tracks from percussion, sitar, flute and guitars, with every part feeding music full of colour, movement and curiosity. I ended that review happily under its spell. Two years later, album number four comes back through the same trusted label with its feet somehow moving faster and its gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the path ahead. Honesty Flowers extends across eleven tracks and roughly seventy minutes, giving Ferrari enough room to build a whole new world for us to lose ourselves in.
Ferrari wrote, played and recorded the record in his barn studio in a small mountain village overlooking Parma. On stage, Upupayāma expands into a six-piece band, with the songs morphing through performance and improvisation. Here the starting point is one man surrounded by his instruments listening closely to where a repeated figure might take him. Honesty Flowers follows the handmade warmth of Ferrari’s earlier work while bringing its rhythmic instincts right to the front.
Ferrari describes the origins of the album in very physical terms.
“Honesty Flowers was born from listening to lots of funk music from all over the world, lots and lots of African music, and from listening to myself as I spent whole nights playing all kinds of percussion instruments. I would fall into a sort of trance and play the same rhythm for hours on congas or on a djembe. It’s an album that was born above all from the beauty of being able to narrate the unknown and recognise yourself in it, which could translate into telling stories and bringing them to life.”
That sense of travel shapes everything that follows. You enter through the beat, and through the music you are sent on your way.
The album begins by establishing its pulse. ‘Fliiim / Laliīmph’ feels like Ferrari opening every door at once, allowing percussion, fuzz and repeated guitar figures to set the room in motion. He describes ‘Fliiim’ as though Can had chosen to write a funk song, and that thought fits the track’s earthy forward movement. The first part keeps the body alert, circling a groove with increasing heat, while ‘Laliīmph’ carries that energy towards broad open ground, a crossing powered by rhythm and the promise of an unknown destination. It makes for a generous beginning, one that tells you straight away that this album wants your feet involved as much as your imagination.
After that long departure, ‘Gilded Meditations’ draws you into a closer circle. Ferrari pictured the opening as entering the hollow of a tree and finding a ritual already underway inside, and the track carries that enclosed, communal quality. The percussion feels close enough to touch, with each beat guiding the surrounding textures into place. The insistent flute and rhythmic wah’d guitars keep your feet moving as Ferrari sings the meditation. Even the bass takes its turn at carrying the melody in this uplifting hallucination of a track.
‘Mystic Chords of Memory’ keeps funk close to its centre, though its guitar voice has a sharper temper. The title offers the suggestion of remembrance, while the playing refuses to settle into anything soft or sleepy. Rhythm presses onwards, strings bite at its edges, and the track begins to show how Ferrari’s vocal delivery remains meditative in the spaces between the powerful guitar riffs that growl angrily one minute then become exultant the next. I need to keep reminding myself this is one guy making this wall of sound.
With ‘Oyob’, percussion and rock and roll guitar speak with the same urgency. Ferrari sees the song as sitting somewhere between a pagan ritual and a classic rock track, and that pairing gives it its character. There is ceremony in the repetition and swagger in the guitar, a satisfying sense of gathering around an idea and pushing it until it sparks. The drums carve out a tribal rhythm that transport you to a temple somewhere in the Amazon rainforest. What makes this one stand out is the space everything gets. Drums are the constant but vocal, guitar and bass all get their moment to shine.
The record takes a longer breath on ‘In The Solstice Sun’. Built around gentle drone music before turning towards a freer release, it opens a wider emotional space in the album. Ferrari links the song to the corruptibility of human beings and to the unruly thought of everyone abandoning restraint for a day. The opening section allows that idea to develop slowly before contemplation gives way to a grin, and the track finds pleasure in letting the rules loosen for a little while. This becomes one funky number and will have you moving!
‘Sound Mirrors’ works from a beautifully simple premise, two sounds reflecting one another so that echoes from earlier and later moments appear together. Coming after the release of ‘In The Solstice Sun’, it feels like a point of recalibration. The song lets repetition turn reflective, drawing your attention to how a sound changes when it returns in a different setting. Past and future seem to share the same room for six minutes, while Ferrari keeps the rhythm present enough to hold the album’s sense of movement.
A lovely thread of continuity runs through ‘Mokushō’. Its earliest ideas date back to material Ferrari noted down around the first Upupayāma album, before returning to those fragments for Honesty Flowers. The song arrives with the calm assurance of something that has waited for its proper moment. Ferrari associates it with waking in rural Japan, and its eight minutes possess the measured patience of a morning beginning slowly, with light entering a familiar room and a new day coming into focus.
Another piece with roots in an earlier period, ‘Old Sky, Wandering Clouds’ reaches back to the time between Ferrari’s first and second records. His image for the track is night rain followed by trees dripping in the early morning, with happiness quietly settling in. That feeling suits its place late in the album. After so much motion, the song allows space for contentment, carrying the pleasure of standing still after travelling far enough to feel the distance in your bones.
My album highlight comes next ‘Yuya’ condenses the rhythmic spirit of Honesty Flowers into one direct, dancing piece. Ferrari conceives it as a ritual dance, and it arrives with the sense of a circle widening as new feet join in. There is undiluted joy here, expressed through repetition and motion, with the guitars repeated circular riff playing nicely with the syncopated drumming. I love how the song dips in and out but it’s when it comes back that you are lifted and can’t help but dance! By this stage the record has made a communal place of its rhythms, and ‘Yuya’ brings you into the middle of it.
‘Baobab’ is bursting with character. Ferrari has explained that the song began on acoustic guitar, before a sitar line suggested “a group of misfits on an old caravan” That image gives the song a playful, rough-hewn gait, as a travelling party of wanderers bumps along with little need to arrive anywhere quickly. Electric guitar adds another voice to the tale, and its brief running time makes the whole thing feel like a joyful scene glimpsed from the roadside, loud with friendship and the happiness of carrying on. This one is a lot of fun.
The closing ‘Morning Temple’ arrives as the album’s first clear light after the nighttime rituals, rain and roaming paths that have preceded it. Ferrari frames the song as the feeling of waking with the knowledge that something wonderful is going to happen, and it provides a fitting goodbye. The record has spent its time following rhythm into unfamiliar forests, wooded paths and travelling celebrations. Here it opens the door onto a beautiful morning leaving you refreshed, curious and ready to start again.
By the time Honesty Flowers finishes, the strongest impression is of Ferrari allowing rhythm to write across every instrument he touches. Guitars, sitar, flute, keys and percussion become part of the same restless language, carrying one musician’s nighttime experiments into scenes that feel shared and alive. When I first met Upupayāma through Mount Elephant, I found a record that took me far from home. This fourth album stays with you for longer and asks more of your body, your patience and your willingness to follow an idea without demanding a fixed destination. This record has brought me so many happy moments these last few weeks. Ferrari has planted honesty in the rhythm, and these flowers keep opening wherever your feet decide to go.
A new F.O. Machete single is here and I’m buzzing. My own route into the Glasgow duo opened with Mother of a Thousand, their 2025 return after a lengthy time apart, and I was more than happy to follow them into ‘I’m Fine, Are You?’ when that next single appeared. That song suggested Natasha Noramly and Paul Mellon had returned with a fine album under their arms and a freshly sharpened appetite to keep moving. ‘Sleeper Cell’ only confirms my suspicions. This is a band enjoying its new chapter, and you can hear the pleasure in every turn.
For those just jumping into F.O. Machete, they have quite the back story. Noramly and Mellon formed the band in Glasgow in April 2003, releasing My First Machete before following it with Blaze of Flashes. A run of releases, headline shows and support slots with Dinosaur Jr. and TV On The Radio established them as a distinctive presence in UK indie music before the band paused in 2011. Noramly headed to Los Angeles and joined Bedtime for Toys, with Mellon going on to tour with Red Light Company and work with Human Don’t Be Angry and Bdy_Prts. Their reunion in 2023 led to Mother of a Thousand, and for those of us who entered the story at that point, it felt like finding a band fully alert to the joy of making a racket together again.
From its first moments, ‘Sleeper Cell’ is driven by Paul Mellon’s guitar, a riff with enough grit to catch on your sleeve and enough swing to set your shoulders moving. There is a gallus strut in the way the song holds itself, alongside the worn in looseness that has always made this pair so appealing. It feels lean and immediate, with the guitar doing exactly what a great single needs it to do! Natasha Noramly gives the track its cool centre. Her vocal delivery carries the tune with a calm sense of command, allowing the strange tale at its heart to appear almost reasonable for a moment. That takes real skill when the opening image involves a woman dreaming that her teeth have fallen out, before waking into the role of an agent under questioning with a drawer holding a supply of plastic lemons. Yes, it’s gloriously daft, and the song is even better for it! After two decades, a long pause and a joyous return, F.O. Machete sound completely at ease with their own sense of mischief.
What I love most about ‘Sleeper Cell’ is the slacker riffage. It leaves you eager for the album, eager for the next part of the tale, and delighted that F.O. Machete remain so willing to make their pop songs this playful and this strange. Whatever code this ‘Sleeper Cell’ has been programmed to deliver, it is already working on me.
I’ve been a long-time follower of Fuzzed Up & Astromoon Records. They’ve been releasing a steady stream of lathe cut seven-inch singles that have introduced me to so many amazing bands. I’ve always loved the single as a format. Here’s two songs to introduce you to what a band are capable of. On a side note, not all lathe cuts singles are of the best quality. Not so with FU&AM Records. Every one is cut beautifully with zero surface noise and a real dynamism in the sound reproduction. Shout out to 3.45 RPM Vinyl Lathe Cutting for their amazing work.
Vinyl geekery aside every single is a must buy for me. This week the label are about to release a single from Ghost Patterns, a London psychedelic shoegaze band whose new single ‘Silhouette’ / ‘Cirrus’ places distance, separation and the wish to return home at the centre of its world. If your introduction to their music comes through these two tracks, then it’s an introduction with plenty of weight behind it. Let’s get you caught up.
Ghost Patterns formed in 2019, with a history that already reaches across a strong run of recordings and live shows. Their debut EP Oracle and album Infinite both arrived in 2021, followed by a succession of singles between 2022 and 2025. On stage they have shared bills with Helicon, Cult Of Dom Keller, Daiistar and New Candys, before more recent UK dates supporting Ceremony East Coast, Tremours and The Dharma Chain. That places them firmly among the psyche and shoegaze bands who understand the pleasure of volume, repetition and songs that slowly reveal their inner colours.
Across this new single, Ghost Patterns look at a world that has slipped off course from a distant viewpoint, carrying a deep wish for connection and a route back to somewhere familiar. It is a big emotional idea for two songs to hold, and the physical single gives it an appealing shape: one side for the outline below, one side for the cloud high above it.
Side A gives us ‘Silhouette’, a title that suggests a figure viewed at distance, familiar in shape while its details remain out of reach. Heavy repeating fuzz supplies the foundation, with distorted guitars gathering in broad layers and Walker’s drums lending the mass a firm pulse. Hale allows density to feel inviting, building a guitar sound with real heft and a melodic current moving through its centre. Pedal shaped tones and analogue synth colours sit around those guitars. The song’s emotional charge comes from that separation. ‘Silhouette’ keeps home present as an outline, close enough to recognise and far enough away to ache for.
Once the record turns, ‘Cirrus’ lifts the viewpoint higher. The dreamier reach of the Ghost Patterns sound is given space here, with modulated shoegaze washes and keyboard tones spreading around the layered guitars. Its title is beautifully chosen. Cirrus suggests thin clouds hanging far above the ground, and that image fits a song concerned with removal and return. Walker’s percussion provides a human motion inside the haze, while the melodic shapes point towards warmth beneath all of that altered guitar colour. ‘Cirrus’ feels like the point where longing begins to find direction, looking down through the cloud and searching for the place it still calls home.
‘Silhouette’ / ‘Cirrus’ gives you a clear sense of why their music has found a home within current psychedelic and shoegaze circles. They build songs that can carry thick guitar noise and a very human desire for belonging in the same breath. This single leaves you looking through its haze with a quiet hope that distance can be crossed and familiar ground can be reached again. From its first shadow to its last high cloud, Ghost Patterns leave an outline clear enough to follow home.
Static Sounds Club 