Further Listening:

5. The Key To A Good Stew? Low & Slow Country

Not a fan of doing things the easy way, The Slow Country are a seven-piece indie-folk project with members strewn between Manchester and London. While they’ve yet to release a great deal of music into the world, the band has plenty of experience, with regular touring, festival shows, and support slots with the likes of The Last Dinner Party and Opus Kink. Having just completed a tour supporting Australian act Floodlights, the band dipped their toe into recorded material with the excellent new single, Amy Stew.

A song the band suggest is about, “fading memories and imagined futures“, Amy Stew finds vocalist Charlie Smith attempting, “to look towards moments of loss with kindness and acceptance“. Musically, this is a fascinating amalgam of styles, a blurring of folk instrumentation, slacker jangle, and Los Campesinos-like emotive indie. There’s even room for a voicemail message mid-song, a poignant reflection of a friendship fading from view and the hope it can be restored. It could be horribly jarring, but somehow in the melting pot of ideas that The Slow Country throw at the track, it makes perfect sense. I’m particularly fond of the outro, two voice sing of how, “like an old t-shirt I missed you, like the summer sun I missed you”, before a false ending gives way to a wiry flourish of guitar, the song choosing to end with a flourish of hope, not an ode to what was.

Amy Stew is out now. For more information on The Slow Country visit https://linktr.ee/slowcountry.

4. The Golden Times Are Coming For Giant Day

Hailing from rural Pennsylvania, Giant Day are the duo of Derek Almstead and Emily Growden, individually known for their work with the likes of Olivia Tremor Control, Marshmallow Coast, and of Montreal. The pair left Athens, Georgia, after becoming caretakers of their family farm in 2020, and stepped away from the buzz of the new music scene that had always been a huge part of their life. Their 2024 debut, Glass Narcissus, was, “a desperate signal emanating from off the grid”, something the band sought to strengthen on their new album Alarm, a record heavy with the weight of the world at large. Ahead of the release, the band shared the first single from the record, Golden Times.

As with much of Giant Day’s previous material, Golden Times is somewhat character-driven, Emily explaining that it, “explores the mind of a cult leader; a successful narcissist and charlatan who is fulfilling the fantasy of absolute power”. Within this fictional space, though, Giant Day invite us to see mirrors of reality, questioning, “the “only I can save you” way of thinking which is causing so much damage to our country”. Musically, the track is one that’s likely to delight existing fans of the duo’s previous output, a cacophony of shoegazey guitars, clattering industrial percussion, and layered vocals reminiscent of early-Beach House, if they were sat lower into the mix. That Derek cites The Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine as key influences should surprise nobody. Derek has spoken of the inspiration of music that leaves, “space for the listener’s brain to react”, and here that’s evident. It’s a trick present in so many art forms, the way the Coen Brothers will end a film with an unresolved ending, or abstract painters like Rothko give us room to find our own meaning. Here, Giant Day offer you the space to make your own Golden Times, to remain naive to the forces at play or to see their tendrils in every moment. There’s no right way to enjoy Giant Day, but just make sure you give it a go.

Alarm is out October 10th via Elephant 6 Recording Co. For more information on Giant Day visit https://linktr.ee/giantdaye6

3. You’ll Never Want To Say Goodbye To The Cords

As featured in these pages back in July, The Cords are the indie-pop sister duo of Eva and Grace Tedeschi, who formed a band when it turned out they liked the 1980s indie sound a lot more than most of their friends did. Since then, The Cords have quietly become the heirs apparent to the Scottish indie-pop throne, sharing stages with the likes of The Vaseline, Belle and Sebastian, and Camera Obscura, as well as pretty much any Slumberland Records alumni who came to these shores. It’s fitting then that their debut album is a co-release between the aforementioned Slumberland and the Skep Wax label funded by Rob Pursey and Amelia Fletcher, themselves figureheads of the original indie movement. Ahead of the album’s release at the end of September, the band shared their latest single, When You Said Goodbye.

The seemingly widespread appeal of The Cords is written all over When You Said Goodbye, for starters, they tick all of the boxes for the indie-pop heads, the jangly guitars, breezy harmonies, and dewy-eyed romanticism all present, correct, and entirely lovely. What lifts this above pure saccharine nostalgia, though, is that The Cords aren’t doing this to sound like someone else; there’s an honesty to their songwriting, a sense not of recycled teenage feelings, but real ones explored in real time. As they sing, “when you said goodbye, I still had so much to say, oh, but you’re going anyway”, you can feel the poignancy, and like Alvvays or The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart before them, you realise this isn’t pastiche or parody, it’s just the next phase of a style of music that thankfully keeps re-inventing itself. Don’t back against The Cords being at the forefront of a new indie-pop revival, heartache and beautiful melodies are never going out of style.

The Cords is out September 26th via Skep Wax (UK/EU) & Slumberland (US). For more information on The Cords visit https://linktr.ee/thecordsband.

2. Emergence Collective Take An Early Morning Dip

“Everything we do is entirely improvised and in the moment. None of it is predetermined and it won’t happen again”. That, in a way, is the mission statement of Emergence Collective, the Sheffield Collective led by four project directors and consisting of around 30 members who pop up at their open monthly sessions in a variety of locations across their home city. Up until now, their recorded output has always been live, and named in honour of the venue, with both 2023’s Fly Tower and 2025’s Chapel living up to their names. So perhaps their next record should actually be called Recording Studio, as for the first time they entered one, giving themselves one day to record an entire album with zero plan, “we pick a key and that’s the only instruction”. While that all sounds both exciting and a potential disaster, we’ll have to wait until November to be sure. For now, comes the record’s title track, and first single, Swimming in the early hours.

In my formative musical years, I went through periods of listening to a lot of instrumental music, normally the more intense post-rock side of things, but it has always been something I fall in and out with; the attention span required to really listen sometimes escapes me. Now, while this is not entirely instrumental, there’s a lovely moment, around four minutes in, where a human voice comes to the fore; it does, however, last nearly eighteen minutes without a single word being spoken. What I love about this piece is that despite being wordless, it feels delightfully organic, similarly to the likes of Lau or Haiku Salut; this is instrumental music with a human touch. It is never synthetic or overly grand, as close to folk music as it is to classical, from the opening violin that sounds like it’s echoing around some grand valley basin, to the rise and fall of the breath through the layers of woodwind. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give this is that it reminds me of the great Penguin Cafe Orchestra, an act that blurred the lines of so many styles and created something entirely their own and yet entirely accessible, and here, Emergence Collective sound like they could be every bit as thrilling.

Swimming In The Early Hours is out November 7th via Redundant Span Records. For more information on Emergence Collective visit https://www.emergencecollective.co.uk/

1. Tulpa Are Making Waves

Part two of today’s Skep Wax double-header, Tulpa are a hot-off-the-presses quartet who are already making quite a splash on the UK indie scene. Despite up until now, releasing precisely zero music into the world, the Leeds-based band have already completed a session for Riley & Coe and supported the likes of Pale Blue Eyes and The Bug Club. Breaking their release duck, this week the band shared their debut single, and something of a band anthem, Let’s Make a Tulpa! The track is the first taster of their debut album, Monster Of The Week, which will arrive at the end of November.

A Tulpa, for those like me who didn’t have a clue, is, “a mythical being manifested into existence through the act of concentrated thought, like an imaginary friend brought to life, but (sometimes) scarier”. So while we quite possibly shouldn’t all jump head long into making them, Tulpa have certainly created a soundtrack that makes you want to get on board. Listening to the track, it’s easy to see why people are already getting excited about this band’s potential. Let’s Make A Tulpa is a blast of the best transatlantic indie of the 90s, like the middle ground of Elastica’s swagger and the Breeders’ crunch, it makes you want to throw yourself onto a sticky dancefloor and throw some angular artsy shapes to the bounding drum rhythms and riotously good guitar riffing. Proof were it need Tulpa’s aren’t just for Halloween ghost stories, Monster Of The Week is going to be offering whole year round thrills.

Monster Of The Week is out November 28th via Skep Wax Records. For more information on Tulpa visit https://linktr.ee/tulparockband.

Header photo is Tulpa courtesy of the band.