Further Listening:

5. I Predict Good Things For Maneater

A duo based in Vancouver, Maneater formed nearly a decade ago, but nearly never made it to releasing a debut album. The painful fallout from issues in their wider friendship group found bandmates Lindsay and DJ living in different countries, unsure if their friendship and their band could survive the resultant, “distance and tension”. Time, thankfully, is a great healer. The pair began exchanging ideas online before DJ returned to Vancouver and they got the Maneater band back together. The result is their debut album, Curb Your Appetite, a record ten years in the making that will arrive in October via Mono Tapes, and which the band premiered this week with their new single, Good Things.

Despite it’s upbeat title, Maneater describe good things as, “biting, bitter and quietly mournful”, an audio realisation, “that the person you worked so hard to understand never really showed up in return”. Clocking in at just over two minutes, Good Things is an unsurprisingly sprightly affair, all clattering, battering drums and squalling guitars, Lindsay’s vocal laced with a poised, cutting rage throughout. The lyrics flitter between angry and just plain threatening with the repeated refrain, “I always keep one eye on you”. There’s even time for a brilliantly abrupt ending, as if the band have slammed a full stop firmly at the end of this particular life chapter and are very ready to move on with their lives. While it nods back to acts like Pretty Girls Make Graves or Sleater Kinney, Maneater’s music also feels contrastingly forward-glancing. It might have been a long time coming, yet on this evidence Curb Your Appetite is shaping up to be well worth the wait.

Curb Your Appetite is out October 17th via Mono Tapes. For more information on Maneater visit https://maneaterband.bandcamp.com/.

4. Daffo’s Sharp New Single

Named after the annual blooming of daffodils in their childhood home, Daffo is the solo moniker of Los Angeles-based songwriter Gabi Gamberg. Still a student at Idyllwild Arts Academy, when they released their debut album Crisis Kit in 2021, the success of that record, as well as the 2023 follow-up Pest, persuaded Gabi to really give their own music a go. Now signed to Concord Records, the third Daffo album, Where The Earth Bends, will arrive at the end of September, and this week they shared a new single, Dagger Song.

Described by Gabi as, “a nice example of letting myself sit in my feelings rather than intellectualising or analysing them from a distance”, Dagger Songs finds them lamenting the sudden end of a friendship, focusing on, “our matching dagger tattoos and about mourning our relationship“. The music has a fitting level of smouldering angst, starting with low-sung guttural guitars, ticking drum beats, and layered downbeat vocals, before exploding into walls of feedback. Gabi’s vocal, something of a tonal doppelganger for Jessica Lea Mayfield, is particularly seething throughout, with repeated references to being let down by the songs recipient, “it’s fine if you want to be left alone, but you made a promise then, will you keep your promise”, often followed by silence as they fade back into the cacophonous noise. It’s an intriguing next step, and with UK tour dates at the end of October, and a US jaunt with Wednesday, 2025 is already looking like the year where Daffo really starts to bloom.

Where The Earth Bends is out September 26th via Concord Records. For more information on Daffo visit https://www.daffomusic.com/.

3. Dean Johnson’s New Material Is Just So Much Better

Dean Johnson appeared on these pages back in June with Before You Hit The Ground, the first single from his latest album, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. The subsequent months have seen the good reviews and radio plays roll in, people enamoured both with his story of finding well deserved fame in your 50s after a lifetime as a fixture on your local scene, and more importantly with his absolutely dynamite songwriting. Ahead of the album’s arrival, Dean decided to treat us to one more snippet, in the shape of the fabulous final single, So Much Better.

So Much Better finds Dean going full Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, imagining what it would be like to be able to have, “a mind wiped clean after a breakup”. Musically, it picks up on many of the stylistic flourishes that are becomes trademarks of Dean’s songwriting, whether it’s the languid sleepiness of the acoustic guitars, or the easy soaring of his vocal, which makes the beautiful complexity of the dancing melodies seem oddly effortless. Lyrically, there’s something oddly romantic about this tale of eradication and freedom, as he sings, “a stranger calls my name, there’s something in her smile that makes me feel a little strange but I don’t remember you”, even if the take away he seems to want is the near protest, “let me pass on through, I’m feelin’ so much better now”. While Dean’s music has an undeniable retro quality, it’s never feels like a pastiche, because the honesty and simplicity is so clearly from the heart, with music this good, Dean, we can most definitely be friends.

I Hope We Can Still Be Friends is out now via Saddle Creek. For more information on Dean Johnson visit https://www.deanjohnsongs.com/.

2. Spielmann’s Got The Blues

Something of a fixture on the Leeds music-scene, although originally from my current home city of Sheffield, Ben Lewis has done pretty much every job going in the music industry, promoter, DJ, band member, producer, and now as Spielmann, solo artist. He’s appeared in my favourite EPs of the year two years running, and presumably inspired by the thought of a (probably – I haven’t actually checked) unprecedented hat-trick, he’s going to be releasing another one, the excellently titled, Back By Popular Demand. Ahead of the release, this week he shared the Brexit querying new single, Blue Passports.

While Ben’s music has often seen him at least partially masked by the presence of characters, Blue Passports is perhaps his most honest offering to date. It’s nakedly political, a slice of social commentary with a real personal streak thrown in for good measure. The song reflects how Brexit cut to Ben’s identity, as a proud European, the son of a German mother and a father whose parents were Holocaust refugees, Ben noting how the track is, “set against the backdrop of living in a  country that’s generally felt safe but lately I’ve started to question that“. The song finds Ben lamenting the state of the country and his own inaction in equal measure. We find him angrily recalling the loaded vitriol of Brexit, “I saw a woman screaming “go back home” to someone in an NHS uniform” and decrying the demise of the hospitality industry, “I’d advise booking in that restaurant, it seems everything is shutting down”, but before long he brings us back to the trademark self-deprecation, “I’m bored of these convos they don’t go nowhere, I should probably join a protest, I should probably leave my bed”. While there’s a distinct change of viewpoint, if you’re worried, or perhaps excited, he’s gone full Billy Bragg, there’s still plenty of Spielmann to go around, as Ben puts it, “it’s still just a big singalong banger isn’t it? Makes you sing, makes you smile, make you think. You’re welcome”.

Back By Popular Demand is out September 26th via EMI North/Launchpad. For more information on Spielmann visit https://linktr.ee/spielmannsongs.

1. Madi Diaz Will Never Provoke Ambivalence

Madi Diaz’s musical career has been something of a slow-burn. After studying at Berklee College of Music, she began releasing her music in the mid-noughties, but only really found her moment in the sun with 2021’s History of a Feeling, and it’s Grammy-nominated follow-up, Weird Faith. She even found time between the two records for a brief aside as a guitarist in Harry Styles’ band, but with these good times for her career came some personal strife. Madi ended a serious relationship, turned away from life as she knew it, and decamped to solitude on an island. There she started to pick up the pieces, and they formed the shape of her new record, Fatal Optimist, a record about, “the innate hope for something magical” that comes with not knowing the outcome but still choosing, “to experience every moment that happens, and put your whole heart in it”. That record will arrive in October via ANTI- and this week Madi shared the latest single from it, Ambivalence.

The second song to be lifted from Fatal Optimist, Ambivalence seems to find Madi contemplating whether the small wins are enough, whether a minor moment of joy can override a wider sense of disinterest. Musically, Ambivalence is Madia Diaz as her sweeping best, as with just a guitar and voice, she creates a melodic canvas, her voice swooping like a swallow atop the rhythmic lurch of the accompanying acoustic. While the lyrics sing repeatedly of ambivalence, the rawness of the voice suggests anything but, “can’t make up my mind, you win me over every time, you’re always right here, I’m still not used to it, ambivalence”. Throughout, there’s a push-and-pull, a feeling that, as painful as it can be, sometimes we need to cut the old ties to move on, to become ambivalent to the things we’ve previously held so dear and find the freedom that comes with a fresh start.

Fatal Optimist is out October 10th via ANTI- For more information on Madi Diaz visit https://madidiaz.com/

Header photo is Madi Diaz by Allister Ann