20. Mediocre – To Know You’re Screwed [Dangerbird Records]

19. A Day Without Love – Tour Is Not A Road Trip [Ur Mom Records]

18. Get Wrong – S/T [Alcopop!]

17. Wormboys – Small Time [Self-Released]

16. Prima Queen – Not The Baby [Self-Released]

15. Lilo – I Don’t Like My Chances On The Outside [Dalliance Recordings]

14. Daneshevskaya – Long Is The Tunnel [Winspear]

13. Sasha Adrian – Token [Celebration Records]

12. Crooks & Nannies – No Fun [Grand Jury Music]

11. Zelma Stone – A Dance [Self-Released]

---

10. Shangri-Lass – Over & Over [Redundant Span]

Shangri-Lass is the solo project of Rose Love, previously best known as the bassist of Welsh-speaking, Sheffield-based myth rock band Sister Wives. After growing up as the daughter of hippies, turned born-again Christian parents, who, “gave away all their best records”, Rose rebelled in her teenage years by throwing herself into a thriving music scene, DJing at 50s and 60s inspired club nights, playing in surf rock bands and learning that most devilish of instruments, the banjo. While her musical journey has taken many twists and turns, her love for creativity never waned, and as illness, in the form of CFS/ME and Fibromyalgia, seemed to bring the walls in around her, it was in music she found relief, as she puts it, “when you lose life as you know it, you find out what’s important to you and what makes you feel good”. The result was her debut EP, Over & Over, released via the exciting new label, Redundant Span, co-run by her Sister Wives bandmate Liv Willars.

Across just four tracks, Over & Over seemed to pack in a lifetime of experience and sonic admiration, taking in influences that seemed to span decades and continents, owing as much to The Crystals and T-Rex as it does to any of her musical contemporaries. The EP opens with the excellent single Parallel, a song that has a slinky psychedelic edge reminiscent of Unloved, as it dissects the carnage and chaos of a relationship that burnt bright, and painfully brief. Elsewhere, Dragonfly takes things down a notch with Bat For Lashes-like synths combining with swampy synth-bass, while The Scandal is the grittiest, most musically unhinged moment like The White Stripes at their most visceral, if they’d ever caved into hiring a bassist. Perhaps the stand out though is Father’s Daughter, “a mess of ideas from a messy brain”, which sounds like the untapped middle ground of Goldfrapp and Metronomy, and in its danceable psychedelia, might just mark out Sheffield as the unlikely starting place for an overdue Electro-Clash renaissance. Ultimately Over & Over feels like a fabulous musical grab bag, the sound of an artist overflowing with influences and a love of making music in all styles and from all eras.

---

9. Dancer – As Well [GoldMold Records]

It was a year of two EPs for the Glaswegian quartet Dancer, they burst onto the scene with February’s self-titled offering and were back at it again in October with their even better follow-up, As Well. The band contains various familiar faces, with members playing variously with the likes of Nightshift and Order Of The Toad, they’re fronted by Gemma Fleet who played with one of my favourite bands of recent years, The Wharves. For As Well, the band descended on the increasingly legendary Green Door Studio in Glasgow, recording direct to tape with the aim of making the harsh songs harsher and the slower efforts, “chime more melodically”.

While they wear the influence of Life Without Building’s like a much-loved badge of honour, here Dancer seemed to stretch themselves further, from Chill Pill snarling and howling, like Dry Cleaning colliding with Black Sabbath through to And Jesus Wept, a slinky, strutting, distinctly unreligious number which starts on the hills of Rio De Janeiro and ends with the Lord’s Prayer lost to a wall of static. While the music straddles the decades, some of the lyrical reference points seem to scream the early 90s from the rooftops, from giving their ode to grating and sautéing the distinctly Keith Floydian-title Cordon Bleu, through to the reference to BBC Disc Jockeys and the annoying presence of the “massive colourful roadshow bus” on Pulp Thriller. Amidst the playful-with-hidden-depth lyricism that rolls out across the record, perhaps the finest moment is the most straight-forward, Love, where the guitars tumble out like golden syrup and the vocals chime sincerely of love, annoyance and the often thin line between the two. 2023 was the year Dancer laid out a blueprint of just how exciting they could be, and the even better news, is the band’s debut album, 10 Songs I Hate About You, is due out in the middle of March, so we won’t have to wait long for the next chapter in this thrilling, and rapidly unfurling musical story.

---

8. Divorce – Heady Metal [Gravity Records / EMI]

Heady Metal might come in a full eight places lower than Divorce’s previous EP offering, Get Mean, did back in 2022, but something tells me the Nottingham quartet might not be too worried. 2023 was a breakout year for the band featuring relentless touring, an awful lot of radio play and journalists tripping over themselves to declare them one of 2024’s most likely to succeed bands. That they achieved all that with an EP quite as delightfully odd as Heady Metal just makes their ongoing triumphs all the more wonderful, even the artwork was weird, the band barefoot in what look like white surgical scrubs surrounded by frankly far too many out of focus dogs, if that’s what pop music’s going to look like in 2024 then I’m all in.

The songs on offer were nearly as eclectic as the aforementioned doggy cover stars, from the full-on musical melodrama of Right On Time, which could almost have been Regina Spektor fronting Television, through to brilliant closing number Heaven Is A Long Way, an atmospheric orchestral number with a touch of early Sufjan Stevens. While they’re a hard band to pin down, they’re an easy one to love, whether it was Sex & The Millennium Bridge, where the guitars batter down your ears like the wind rushing across the titular crossing point or Birds, a song fittingly about finding sudden fame after wanting it for years, and the imposter syndrome that comes with that, even if, via country-licked guitars and dual vocals, it sounded more confident than they ever had. Particularly wonderful is Eat My Words, all twangy slide guitars and drum clatter, it deals with the times we say too much or too little and the frustration we find in our own actions, as Felix Mackenzie-Barrow sings, “I’m sorry for getting too drunk and killing your vibe with the headline band”. I cover an awful lot of bands on this site who probably won’t ever get their moment in the sun, so when one does it’s something to really celebrate, wherever their music takes them, you’re unlikely to find a more life-affirming Divorce than this one.

---

7. Melotone – And…Beyond [Think Twice Records]

Originally from the Black Country and now based out of Bristol, Melotone are a band delightfully out of step with modern musical trends. Fronted by Brazilian-born songwriter Alec Madeley, the band’s influences lean heavily on sixties psychedelia and tropicalia, creating a fascinating amalgam of Rio De Janeiro and Wolverhampton with the band admitting they don’t know, “what genre we are, what scene we’re in, which artists we’re most similar to”. Back in July, they teamed up with Think Twice Records for the release of their debut EP, And… Beyond, a four-track collection exploring, “questions of identity and of being in the unknown, but creating purpose in this space”.

The record opens with Fields, a slinky, lurching number where the bass and guitars play off beautifully like Two Dancers-era Wild Beasts, beneath a vocal croon pitched between Grizzly Bear’s melodies and the atmospheric tone of The Middle East (a reference point I sincerely hope someone gets as I spent about half an hour scouring Last.FM trying to remember their name). From there the record flows, and Melotone’s music really does flow, into the title track, which switches between English and Portuguese, as it melds rolling bassy rumbles with the sort of skittering staccato percussion Philip Selway would be proud of. Ceilings dials up some of the band’s psych-folk tendencies as fluttering guitars play off against dense complex percussion and Alec’s vocals explore the idea of finding happiness in expression, and how melancholy often finds its way to the fore. The record closes on Running Cold, a song of hazy memories and the dangers of living in the past, set to jazzy, lurching guitar and lithe brushy drums. Listening to And… Beyond there seems to be a real confidence in everything Melotone are doing, boundary-pushing, genreless musical nomads, carving out a path uniquely and wonderfully their own.

---

6. Blackaby – Perfect Delusions [Sweat Entertainment]

William Blackaby, the Kent-born, North London-based songwriter behind the Blackaby moniker appeared in this same list back in 2021, with his second EP, Everything’s Delicious. Across both that record and his excellent debut, What’s On TV? Will had quickly established his place in the lineage of wistful, distinctly English songwriters, channelling the spirit of Syd Barret, Ray Davies and the near-contemporary shuffle-pop of Ultimate Painting. Two years on, Will returned in the height of the summer with his latest offering, Perfect Delusions, a record inspired by becoming a father, and the way it sent his thoughts to his own childhood and his “self-extraction” from the Christian Church.

Despite being just a handful of tracks long, Perfect Delusions was a winningly eclectic affair from the vivacious Springsteen-like shuffle of Teenage Purity, which introduced the record to the world, through to the gorgeous floating piano-led Cafe Du Monde, with its simple, but no less gorgeous refrain, “the best thing you can do is fall in love”. Perfect Delusions is both the title track and the EP’s centre-piece, a song about petty jealousy and, “a message to myself to try my best to avoid it“, it fuses the sort of dancing playful guitar line The Wave Pictures do so well, with a series of more bucolic break downs that accompany William’s non-linear memories, from a companion talking through an entire set only to whoop and holler at the end of each song through to William’s mirror-based soul searching, “crows feet digging deeper constantly and I whinge about my slowly balding head”. A personal highlight, perhaps because of a love of The Kinks installed in me via the paternal line, is the wonderfully oddly titled Move Slow (Songs For Eggs), a classic slice of melodic pop that could almost be lifted directly from Muswell Hillbillies and is just as good as anything on there. As the record drifts out on the Bowie-like piano-ballad-goes-glam, Hairstyle, you’re left with the sense of having spent time in the company of a very special songwriter, sure he’s entirely out of step with pop’s prevailing winds, but in an alternative universe somewhere I can only hope William Blackaby is getting all the credit he so thoroughly deserves.

---

5. Spielmann – A Better Man [Self-Released]

Maybe not qualifying as an official EP as such, it seemed facetious to let Spielmann’s excellent collection of 2024 singles, A Better Man slide by on a technicality. Spielmann is the solo celebration of the decade-long growth of Leeds-based DJ, gig promoter and, “someone else’s bandmate”, Ben Lewis. While he’s new to the solo scene, things have already been going rather well for Spielmann, with some high-profile festival appearances, support slots with BC Camplight and Yard Act, and receiving the questionably positive comparison of, “Brandon Flowers in Phoenix Nights”.

The title track, A Better Man, lifts its musical inspiration from the New York indie scene, channelling the likes of LCD Soundsystem and The Walkmen into a song about men who despite themselves can’t help sharing their opinions, as Ben takes on the role of, “the kind of guy you’d tell your friends about”, not silenced by either laughter or boredom that meets his dreary tales of daring-do. Elsewhere The Seventh Time dials up the conversational synth-pop as it embraces the idea of being comfortable in your own skin, concluding with a simple message, “it’s okay to not be okay”. Particularly wonderful is The Right Track, it dials up the wide-screen Americana, coming across like the middle ground of The War On Drugs and Future Islands as it finds Spielmann wondering if he can be the man to finally treat someone the way they deserve to be treated, even if his fears about his own flaws keep rearing their ugly heads. Ben once described Spielmann as, “pop music, but for people who don’t want to admit they like pop music“, so whether you want to admit it or not, if you can’t find the joy in these huge choruses then I’ve got a feeling music, pop or otherwise, might just not be for you.

---

4. Lightheaded – Good Good Great [Slumberland Records]

There’s something to be said for record labels where you can pick up a record and kind of know what you’re going to get. While they dip their toes into subtle variations on a theme, when you pick up an album from Slumberland Records you can be pretty sure you’re going to get a wonderful blast of wistful vocals and jangly guitars, and thankfully, Lightheaded lived up to that expectation. Released in October, the New Jersey-based trio’s debut EP, Good Good Great! is a gorgeous melting pot of 1960s pop, the late 1980s indie-explosion and the many decades of people who’ve gone about shaping those sounds into something fresh and wonderful.

Across five tracks, Lightheaded showcases a winning knowledge of indie-pop history, from the breezy jangle of Mercury Girl, which sounds, well, a bit like the rather excellent and sadly MIA, Philadelphians Mercury Girls, through to Orange Creamsicle Head, which slows things down with skittering drum rhythms, and downbeat vocal melodies as singing-bassist Cynthia Rittenbach questions the point of even trying when the odds are stacked against you, “is it right to try even in the face of a last-place race? Is it right to try, or do I fold the cards and send my regards”. Patti Girl has a similarly willing retro-pop feel to Veronica Falls, while The Garden has a psych-folk quality, like The Byrds if they’d grown up listening to the output of Sarah’s Records. Possibly the most exciting moment is saved to last with The Ronettes like Love Is Overrated, a song that protests a little too loudly in the face of heartache as Cynthia sings, “love is overrated and I’m happy in my room”. This feels like music made by music fans, for music fans, a band clearly in love with their influences and wanting to share them with the world, and if you’ll allow me to speak on behalf of the entire world just this once, we’re very happy to receive them.

---

3. First Day Of Spring – Fly Over Apple Blossom [Self-Released]

A band I singled out as one to watch back at the start of the year, the breakout moment doesn’t seem to have quite arrived for First Day of Spring yet, but listening back to their brilliant debut EP, Fly Over Apple Blossom, it’s quite hard to see why not! The project of Southend-on-Sea raised, London-based songwriter Samuel Jones, First Day Of Spring only released their debut single back in 2022, yet by the time Fly Over Apple Blossom landed at the end of February, they already seemed to be a band with a wonderful sonic maturity, channelling influences from Sparklehorse and The Silvers Jews through to Cocteau Twins and Modest Mouse.

The whole EP was underpinned by a sense of what Samuel describes as, “creative trying”, a songwriter balancing the euphoria and melancholy of still wanting to create something in the mile-a-minute society of the 21st century. The record opens, rather boldly I would say when you’ve only got four tracks to play with, with the near instrumental flow and shimmer of Death Day (Sing To Me), the track is led by a saxophone and adorned with a slew of textural ideas, from twangy guitars to grand reverberating piano chords, there is a voice their buried in the murk, but you’d be hard pushed to make out a word. It takes a confident band to announce themselves to their world in such inauspicious fashion, yet when you’ve got a song as good as Moon Boy to follow, it becomes a masterstroke for fans of subtle revelations. A song about trying, and often failing to live in the moment, Moon Boy is introduced by a reading of Be Drunk, a poem by Charles Baudelaire about, “an aversion to the overwhelming influence of time on everyday life“. From there the track flows on the most languid, aqueous guitar line, the gentle drum tick and latterly some bold violin flourishes, an intriguing amalgam of shoegaze and alt-folk. Operation arrives on a clatter of distortion and pummelled snares, and remains firmly in the energetic lane throughout, dissecting the influence of, “the pesky algorithm” via a deliberately robotic, cobweb-blowing explosion of rather lovely noise. Just as you think you’ve got First Day Of Spring pegged as a band enamoured with My Bloody Valentine and Deerhunter, they suddenly offer a sickeningly good curveball in the final innings, in the shape of the closing track, Normal Person (Love You Forever). The whole thing is beautifully understated, a slow-core pop song in the vein of Elvis Depressedly or Grandaddy, it builds around a chiming keyboard line and layer of fuzzy background, as Samuel sings sweetly on the ability of someone to make the world feel a bit less alien, and the way it makes you want to hang onto them for dear life, “I’ll cook you breakfast and love you forever”. Across Fly Over Apple Blossom, First Day Of Spring seem to almost fizz with potential, a sense of a band who could harness it into something golden or just leave us with this one little snapshot of what might have been, either way, a record this good deserves its moment in sun.

---

2. Lila Tristram – Home [wiaiwya/Woodland Recordings]

Hailing from East London, Lila Tristram describes herself as a musician, fiction writer, artist and teacher, and perhaps all of those factors played into her rather wonderful EP, Home. Living up to its title, Home, presented five intimate snapshots of a life being led, all the tracks recorded, produced and mixed via Lila alone, with the exception of a Facetime cameo from Texan singer-songwriter Austin Basham on the opening track. Despite being a somewhat wintry affair, Home saw the light of day in May, as a co-release between Woodland Recordings and the ever-wonderful wiaiwya, who produced a 10″ version courtesy of Lathe To The Grave, the only UK female-run lathe-cutting business.

Listening to Home, it’s clear Lila’s music lies in that place that one could lazily describe as folk music, yet arguably this is as much the music of place as it is of people, bristling with creaks and buzzes, the record sings with a sense of the space in which it was created, this is a record writ large with that impossible to capture the quality, atmosphere. Take the record’s centrepiece Shelter, one of those songs of subtly majestic kindness, as Lila sings of her desire to protect another from the ravages of the world, “the wind it howls ’round your house and I wanna come and shout, and the waves are crashing ’round your mouth and I want to come and calm them down”, before the whole thing drifts out in an electronic instrumental swell. Elsewhere Caravan offers spectral Lisa/Liza-like folk, resplendent with atmospheric woodwind and finger-picked guitars so light it’s almost as if a gentle breeze is rustling the strings without any human interaction, while January is a gorgeous slice of Americana cut through with an otherworldly, looping electronic edge, the propulsion of the choppy Iron & Wine like guitars contrasted with the hazy questioning of the twin vocals. While most of the record has a distinctly warm quality, despite its comforting title, the closing track, Home, is a surprisingly dark musing straight from the heart. The looping guitar part, resplendent with gorgeously intimate fret buzz, makes for a simple backing for a song of not being able to shift the past from the present, as Lila sings “he will take me out, he’ll make me feel good, but you are in every part”, unable to move on when a part of her wants to go home to a life that no longer exists. While this isn’t a record that screams its charms from the ramparts, home unquestionably offers a warm welcome, an invitation to glimpse humanity and be reminded that sometimes for all the complexity of modern living, home can still be a wonderfully simple place to spend a little time.

---

1. Elanor Moss – Cosmic [Blue Raincoat Music]

While I didn’t make it to as many shows in 2023 as I had perhaps initially envisaged, I did have the pleasure of seeing Elanor Moss perform in the striking, high-ceilinged settings of The Fly Tower at Abbeydale Picture House. It was a rather fitting setting for a songwriter whose music seems to walk the line between the traditional and the gently expansive, her swelling musical powers holding the vast, and rather odd setting in hushed reverie. Many of the highlights that evening came from Elanor’s latest EP, Cosmic, a record of swelling ambitions for the songwriter, recorded as she told me back in March, not in her native Yorkshire, but across the Atlantic in its namesake, New York. It wasn’t just the settings that were new, as Elanor recorded for the first time with a band, and threw herself into the unknown embracing the idea of giving herself, “permission to do it imperfectly”.

Cosmic opens with the excellent Sorry Song, a track which showcases Elanor’s ability to infuse the achingly sombre with a gentle warmth. The subtle drum tick and flourishes of woodwind recalling Andy Shauf as she paints a lyrical picture of domesticity and shrinking from helping hands, “I’m sorry for all the takeaway food, I promise that I’ll get the dishes done soon, I’ll scrub away every stain, the soap keeps the monsters away”. From there the EP slides into the masterful Catholic, which is Elanor at her most deadpan, as she enlists her full band to come across like a much more British-sounding Mitski. Courtesy of a dine-in for two and an existential crisis, she finds herself, “covered in Key Lime trying to find validation online”, before, “guilty like a Catholic, so I drink too much wine until I confess into the arms of a strange, an exchange I’m sure I’ll regret”. The whole track has a knowing chaos about it, a whirlwind of bad decisions, pained memories and self-deprecating humour.

The de facto title track, Cosmic Memory opens the second half, a song that lives up to its Romcom-themed video as it walks the line between past and present. Elanor melds bravado and questioning in the face of an awkward meet-up with an ex, “pass the sugar please, why did you leave?” For all the questions she wants answers to, ultimately Elanor seems to spot the light at the end of the tunnel, realising she’s stuck in a loop like the jilted heroine in some old movie scene, and the only way out is to find a new narrative and escape the dreams and cosmic memories keeping her locked in the past. The EP closes with Mary, the most straightforwardly folk moment here. Mary is straight talking, the lilting vocal contrasted by playful guitar work with a touch of Leonard Cohen, as Elanor sings her support for someone just starting their journey towards change, “you don’t have to be alone, I’m always by the phone”. The song, and the EP with it, fades out to the wistful strains of Danny Boy on the saxophone as if the past is drifting out of view and the future sliding into focus. If this was a record at a personal crossroad, Cosmic Memory felt contrastingly certain, a bold statement of intent from an artist ready for the success she so richly deserves.

---

A little late sure, but still twenty bite size gems from last year, that are well worth your time – thanks for sticking with me during my recent break and my upcoming adjustment to whatever blogging looks like now. I’m excited for this new chapter for the site, and seeing where it takes me – Sam//FTR