Further Listening:

5. Make Some Room For Divorce

Breakout alternative superstars and long-time favourites around here, Nottingham’s Divorce are by anyone’s standards pretty busy right now. One of the year’s most hotly tipped bands, they’ve already been out on the road with Bombay Bicycle Club, The Vaccines and Everything Everything, repressed their excellent Heady Metal EP for Record Store Day and lined themselves up to play pretty much every festival I can think of. This week they’ve announced a headline tour for October, kicking off with a four-night home-town residency at Bodega, news they celebrated with the release of a brand-new single, My Room.

Described by vocalist and bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell as, “an ode to unconditional love“, My Room explores ideas of lowering your guard and “a deep desire to be relaxed about showing affection toward someone that you know extremely well“. My Room is just the latest example of the ambition Divorce possess, a band who are unafraid to throw everything they’ve got at a track, here adding a children’s choir to the closing chorus, to really hammer home the “naïveté and heaviness” of the track. While that could be a cloying, grandiose way to finish a song, for me it works, taking the intimacy of the country-tinged sway that’s present throughout and making it into something more universal, an array of voices singing together of the same shared doubts, as Tiger puts it, “like being back in your childhood bedroom and crying and not really knowing why. But it’s joyous too“. Hype can do funny things to a band, send them skyway before they’re ready and await the inevitable crash, yet Divorce thankfully seem immune to that, still intriguing, still exciting and still very much a band on their own unique musical adventure that might just take them wherever their imagination wants to go.

My Room is out now via Gravity Records / EMI. For more information on Divorce visit https://divorcehq.co.uk/.

4. 7ebra Are Excellent As Normal

I’m always a sucker for Scandinavian indie bands, so it was fantastic news this week with the return of Swedish alternative darlings, 7ebra. Made up of twin sisters Inez and Ella Johansson, the world last heard from 7ebra around the release of their critically acclaimed debut album Bird Hour in the spring of 2023. With upcoming dates playing with both Kindsight and Arab Strap, this week the band returned with their latest single, Normal Song, with a vinyl release lined up for the start of July via PNKSLM.

The band have suggested Normal Song is something of a continuation from where Bird Hour left off, with their songwriting leaning into their melancholy side, as Inez explains, “I see the song being about trying to please everyone but failing”, and ultimately it’s about accepting that’s not always possible, “you think about it and say no, actually, I shouldn’t have to suppress this despair I’m feeling – I wanna cry in an open field. It’s normal to feel these things and you don’t have to hide it, if you don’t want to”. The song’s themes exist in fabulous contrast to the music that accompanies them, for a song about crying in a corner, Normal Song sounds practically joyous, as Tame Impala-like slashes of synth, accompany pounding drum rhythms and the triumphant, festival-ready repetition of the soaring chorus – never has a lyric as bleak as, “I want to cry in an open field” sounded so much like a call to arms. A fabulous return from a band who sound ready for their moment in the limelight, get the right breaks and these two seem destined for much bigger things.

Normal Song is out now via PNKSLM. For more information on 7ebra visit https://www.instagram.com/7ebra/.

3. Kate Davis Is Dancing Her Way Towards A Revolution

2023 was a big year for New York’s Kate Davis as the conservatory-trained jazz musician turned indie hero released her acclaimed second album, Fish Bowl. A deeply personal coming-of-age story it explored Kate casting off the shackles of her former calling and found the inner peace of embracing creativity on her own terms. Wasting no time in getting back to the grind, Kate has already shared one single this year, the excellent Cunty Bang Bang, and this week shared another new track, DDR.

The inspiration for DDR comes from a somewhat unusual source, the Dance Dance Revolution home mat, of which Kate wistfully recalls, “the particular crunch under the various foot force of neighbour kids. The impeccable song list. I go back to these times when life gets real“. Despite its inspiration being all about escapism and simplicity, the story told here is considerably more complex. It is a plot so entwined nobody is truly right or wrong, neither wholly in nor out, just two souls falling in and out of messy orbit with one another, “dance for me tell me something, carefully analyzed and fair in love and war. I think you want me to hurt you, gut you and desert you, end you, end it all”. Musically, the track is equally entwined, starting with a muted, unhurried acoustic guitar, it gradually seems to give way to a growing wall of static, that suddenly cuts out, like throwing open the curtains and letting the warmth of the morning light push the darkness away. Kate’s vocal is fantastic throughout, balletic in the lightness of her melodies, yet rich with the emotion of the words, able to shape the mood of the piece with an effortless grace. Whether this is a stand-alone snapshot, or a sign of bigger things to come, this is a remarkable piece of work, a song that suggests as good as Kate Davis’ music has always been, she’s still only just getting started.

DDR is out now via ANTI-Records. For more information on Kate Davis visit https://katedavismusic.com/.

2. Carpet And Fruit Are A Better Combination Than You’d Expect

The solo project of musician and renowned recording engineer Rob Slater, Carpet caught my ear a few years back now with the pair of excellent EPs, 2021’s self-titled offering and 2022’s Maldon Salt / Men Like Us. It’s been two years without any music from Carpet, not that Rob hasn’t been busy, recording with the likes of Green Gardens and Yard Act, as well as welcoming his first child into the world. Now getting back to his own music, with a slew of live dates both in his native Yorkshire and further afield, this week Rob returned with a brand-new single, Fruit, the first taster of what could be a busy year of new music from the Carpet moniker.

A song that slowly morphed from a cassette demo into its final form, Fruit is the first time Rob has attempted to combine his home recordings into the more polished studio style of his day job at Greenmount Studio, as he puts it, “everything was stemmed off that original cassette recording to create the initial map of the track from which parts could be worked and reworked into a collage of the two“. Despite being from this side of the Atlantic, Fruit had a distinctly Americana feel to it, from the opening, resplendent with chunky, rhythmic guitar chords, through to a surprisingly effective harmonica breakdown, the whole thing brings to mind the likes of Friendship or Sam Evian. Amid the shifting sands of the backing, Rob’s gentle vocals seem almost clouded in thoughtfulness, existing in a similar place of sad-sounding positivity to Bill Ryder-Jones’ most recent output, as he questions the value in the pursuit of ideals against a more simple desire for happiness, “is it a case of if it’s real or if it works?” There’s even room for a rather lovely code at the song’s close, a strange but rather beautiful close to a song that might just be Carpet’s most ambitious release to date.

Fruit is out now. For more information on Carpet visit https://linktr.ee/carpetsongs.

1. The Only Thing Left Is To Listen To Flo Lines

A London-based musician and artist Flo Lines describes her musical process as, “a bit like collaging“, a series of sonic layers patched, looped and stuck together into something far more interesting than the sum of its parts. Flo has taken her time over her debut release, spending a year working in a variety of locations from “a music residency in Suffolk, to my house on Lewisham High Street, to a church in Tulse Hill“, pulling together a twelve-minute, two-track EP, the only thing left is everything, which is out now via Lost Map and was recently previewed by the defacto title track, the only thing left.

Listening to Flo Lines’ music is a truly immersive experience, she creates a sonic world where the more traditional song sections share top billings with the more textural found sounds that share their air time. The Only Thing Left is ostensibly a fairly straight-forward thing; a repeated guitar refrain made up of essentially two chords runs almost throughout the track, the lyrics are sparse, and without fail repeated like mantras, as if Flo’s mind is always getting stuck on a loop, from the initial “the nature of a thing, is that it is everything after all” to the closing “I have never known anywhere else”.  That wonderful simplicity is the key to the song’s other appeals, the way ideas drift in and out of earshot, a piano run here, some bird song there, backing vocals, cellos, and a whole lot more besides. In the most subtle way possible Flo really does throw everything at this track, yet it never becomes clouded, the clarity of her songwriting never gets lost. Throughout this tiny glimpse of Flo’s artistry, there’s magnificent subtlety, an attempt not to capture life’s great peaks and troughs, but instead the slow meander, the way we work through our feelings over months, years, even a lifetime, not always reaching a grand conclusion, just moving along with us as we grow and become the people we are.

The only thing left is everything is out now via Lost Map. For more information on Flo Lines vist https://flolines.cargo.site/.

Header photo is Flo Lines by Olivia Spencer