My weekly further listening is now available via Apple Music.

5. The Bug Club Are Available On Catch Up

It feels like just weeks since I was raving about the new album by The Bug Club (because it was), and they’ve already got a new one on the way, with Every Single Muscle set to arrive at the end of May. Then that’s kind of the way with the Monmouthshire duo, there’s always something excellent out and something even more excellent on the horizon. The follow-up to last year’s acclaimed fourth album, Very Human Features, Every Single Muscle was recorded at Rat Trap Studios in Cardiff with producer Tom Rees. News of its imminent arrival was shared, alongside more dates on their “never-ending” tour and a brand new single, Watching The Omnibus.

Never a band to play by anyone’s rules, The Bug Club’s big return is a mere 80 seconds in length, sounding like White Denim covering The Ramones. There’s two sections really, the chord driven-verses and the relative respite of the chorus with it’s thousand-mile-an-hour guitar riffing and single lyric, a repetition of the title with no context given. The verses perhaps offer more for those looking to get inside the minds of The Bug Club, “I’m still alive and kicking and doing reasonably well, you’ve got to die for something, but there are some things we don’t sell”. As with much of The Bug Club’s output, there’s a hint at the idea of being true to yourself, “I’m not a character in a storybook, I never learn my lines”, it’s a fitting for a band with no interest in fitting into any particular boxes, just riding the wave of a music career, and seeing where it washes them up next.

Every Single Muscle is out May 29th via Sub Pop. For more information on The Bug Club visit https://linktr.ee/thebugclubband.

4.Wendy Eisenberg’s New Single Is To Die For

Although now based in the musical hotspot of Brooklyn, Wendy Eisenberg’s roots are in the less well-worn roads of Western Massachusetts. Having made the move back in 2020, it was perhaps logical that Wendy would find themself wanting something less urban, digging into the pastoral qualities of artists like John Prine and the “weirdo country interpreters” like Richard Dawson and Joanna Newsom. These sounds all fed into their new album, Wendy Eisenberg, a record written in a period they likened to a personal exorcism, “the part of me that felt like I had to be legible to appease imaginary people finally needed to die”. With that intriguing sounding record arriving in April via Joyful Noise, this week Wendy shared the latest single from it, Old Myth Dying.

The song was written in 2023 when,“during an insane fever”, Wendy forewent restorative sleep for creativity, “I wanted to see if I could do this polyrhythm in my right hand and sing over it”. The result of, “disappearing into the action” was a track Wendy notes was, “straightforward and wary, blunter than usual”, as it explored, “the pain of actually knowing what you can and can’t control, and what inherited myths have been lies designed to control you all along”. The song is a strange blend of the familiar and the distinctly odd, as the simple, almost Nursery Rhyme-like rhythmic pattern of the low-notes are overlain with fluttering, double-speed higher notes. That sense of simplicity and complexity is present throughout, the song adorned with both string flourishes and a coming-and-going drum beat that isn’t far off being played on a single snare drum. Amid it all is Wendy’s vocal, pitched somewhere between Joanna Newsom and Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook, as they wonder if society’s rules have just been a lie we use to cover our true selves. An idea present from the opening where they lean into the comforting familiarity, “I’m hearing what I want to hear, something to control, to feel the way I make it feel”, before later confronting the fear in a life lead differently, “nothing feels familiar and I’m scared about everyone leaving me, everything I thought I knew, everything truest to me – was everybody lying? As intriguing and complex as ever, as the album title suggests, this is Wendy Eisenberg in their truest form, and it’s truly a beautiful thing to witness.

Wendy Eisenberg is out April 3rd via Joyful Noise. For more information on Wendy Eisenberg visit https://www.wendyeisenberg.com/.

3. Behold The Fruits Of The Foot & Leg Clinic’s Labour

Formerly known as The Wife Guys of Reddit, The Foot & Leg Clinic are a Glaswegian “wonk-rock” quartet. After self-releasing a couple of EPs, the band went through what they describe as, “a bit of a shiter the past couple years“. A mixture of illness, close bereavements and a year-long hiatus from live shows forced the band to slow down and also gave them space to think about their next move, “it still feels eclectic, but it’s a little bit more focused“. The result is their debut album, Sit Down For Rock and Roll, set for release next month via Bingo Records, and previewed this week by the lead single, Where Did All The Fruit Go?

Described by the band as being, “about getting to a point in your life where you thought you’d have a bit more to show for it, to find that you don’t”. Where Did All The Fruit Go? is a highly relatable summation of a generation growing into a world that isn’t quite as fruitful as they’d been promised. The song is a list of desires from a pineapple, to a swim, to a life with any semblance of meaning. It’s all set to a two-minute pop song, all glam-rock-tinged guitars, fuzzy twin vocals and primal drum pattering. It builds to a head with the chorus-come-outro, as a guitar solos wildly and the vocals become punch-the-airly joyous, even as they repeatedly sing, “where did all the fruit go? I’ve got nothing to show”. With this new song surely marking them out as the band most likely to record Riley & Coe session I’ve ever heard, The Foot & Leg Clinic seem to have come out of the dark rejuvenated, and ready to make an even bigger and fruitier splash.

Sit Down for Rock and Roll is out March 13th via Bingo Records. For more information on The Foot & Leg Clinic visit https://campsite.bio/legclinicband

2. Someday Starts Today For Sluice

We last heard from Durham, North Carolina’s Sluice back in 2023, when they released one of my favourite records of that year in the form of their second album, Radial Gate, a gutsy and compact slice of scene-painting honesty. It was a record that found Justin Morris, “halfway out the door of music”, only to reignite his passion for the musician’s life, even if it came without the dreams of, “the kid reading in a bunk” on a tour, thinking he was destined for stardom. On the band’s upcoming record, Companion, we find Sluice questioning what else music has to offer, and leaning into the connections made, whether it’s to the people or the sheer act of creativity. With Companion set to land next month, this week Sluice shared the second single from the record, Zillow.

Named after the American equivalent of Right Move, Zillow is a song about, “searching for a home in an inhospitable world, a mammalian necessity made a luxury item by The Man”. The track finds Justin recalling working as a carpenter on, “a multi-million dollar house that was almost certainly going to be devoured by the Eno River in the next 25 years”. It was while working that job that he found himself humming, “one of my favourite early Fust Songs”, and their track Battering Ram became the inspiration behind Zillow. Justin reworked the track’s melody into, “my own song about searching for a place to call home”, even as the water’s coming up through the floor, and you’re working for two pennies to rub together. The song’s arrangement is typically beautiful from the Advance Base-like organs of the opening through to the sun rise explosion of the chorus as the woody drums and plodding bass set the foundations for the gorgeous meander of guitar and harmonious layered vocals. Sluice seem to have picked up where Radial Gate left-off, searching for meaning and finding it not in material good or reaching the next step on the ladder to fame, but in the journey, with your companions, and your creative spirits, standing by your side.

Companion is out March 27th via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co. For more information on Sluice visit https://linktr.ee/sluicenc.

1. It’s Always A Pleasure To Catch Up With The Leaf Library

Pioneers of the Walthamstow drone-pop scene, The Leaf Library are a band formed in the mid 2000s by singer Kate Gibson and ex-Saloon guitarist Matt Ashton, who’ve released an indeterminate number of albums, EPs and other delightful things. Their last “proper” album was probably 2019’s The World Is A Bell, a fascinating record built from the idea of creating a single 77 minute long track, as they told me at the time. Their upcoming record, After The Rain, Strange Seeds, is a record with more traditional origins, as the band reconnected with their,“jangly guitar roots”, and decided to embrace the indie-pop tag they’d always shied away from previously. With the new record set to arrive in the coming weeks courtesy of Fika Recordings, this week the band shared the second single from it, Catch Up, Isobel.

The song, co-written with longtime collaborator Melinda Bronstein, finds The Leaf Library reaching out to a friend in need, here via a gentle understanding that a person can be there in person and somewhere else in their mind, “a quiet caught up heart, you’re really there, not there”. Musically, the track is a typically layered beast, with the undercurrent of a lo-fi pop song, inspired in equal parts by the originally indie-purveyors like The Chills or The Go-Betweens and the current indie darlings like The Reds, Pinks and Purples or Peel Dream Magazines. Rather than a gentle build, there’s an urgency to the start, as twin-guitar lines trade blows, before getting swept away as the rhythm section roars into place, creating a tempest for Kate’s fuzzy vocal to sit perfectly into the eye of the storm. Perhaps more than any previous The Leaf Library track, Catch Up, Isobel is a real guitar-forward number, the addition of Firestation’s Mike Cranny to their sound clear for all to see, with the beautiful interplay as reminiscent of King Of Limbs-era Radiohead as it is any indie-pop song. The song swells so subtly throughout that it’s only really at the close you hear how engulfing it’s becomes as the room filling qualities of the brass shine a light on the perfectly judged mixing by Tortoise’s John McEntire. There’s a real confidence to The Leaf Library’s return, after years of crafting and experimentation, they seem to have come back to a place of clarity as to who they are and what they sound like, bright, beautiful and quite possibly better than ever.

After The Rain, Strange Seeds is out March 20th via Fika Recordings. For more information on The Leaf Library visit https://theleaflibrary.com/

Header photo is The Leaf Library by Michael Wood