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5. Don’t Bet On The Brown Horse, It’s A Wreck

Appearing on these pages just last month, around the release of the excellent Sorrow Reigns single, Norfolk’s Brown Horse are now just weeks away from the release of their third album, Total Dive. With a headline UK tour and their first US dates also coming quickly on the horizon, it’s exciting times for the “slacker twang” quartet. Ahead of all that, this week they shared the final taster of Total Dive, in the shape of their new single, Wreck.

Described by the band as, “an ill-fated drive among the abandoned gas stations and otherworldly byways of rural Norfolk”, Wreck is a six-minute blast of vast country-rock. The whole thing is writ large with a certain listless sigh, the lead guitar sounding weary and resigned even as it explodes out of the speakers, lifted by the whispering organs and the pedal steel that howls like the wind through an abandoned, isolated barn. The lyrics seem to track one of those long drives where you’re forced to really speak your truth to the person in the passenger seat, “my hand on the wheel, what did I tell you about asking how I feel”. From there, the conversation seems to deal with the comings and goings of a relationship on the rocks, the protagonist pleading for someone to fight for something but unsure what they’re even fighting for, “I don’t believe you when you say, nothing good could ever come from of you asking me to stay”. While it’s a song with a bruising bleakness, there’s a gutsy honesty to Brown Horse here, a sonic representation of laying it all on the line that might just be their most compelling expression to date.

Total Dive is out April 10th via Loose Music. For more information on Brown Horse visit https://brownhorsemusic.com/.

4.Winning At The Penny Arcade, That’s Just Too Easy

As a major contributor to Veronica Falls, Ultimate Painting and Proper Ornaments, James Hoare has been at the heart of some of my favourite releases of the last decade and a half. In 2024, James emerged with his last alias, Penny Arcade, and the excellent record, Backwater Collage. For his next move, James decided to make a big change, letting the guitars take a back seat and bringing the drum machines and organs to the fore. The result is the upcoming release on Tapete Records, Double Exposure, which James previewed this week via the soulful shuffle of Everything’s Easy.

Emerging, “from a chord sequence which I’d been playing around with for a while”, Penny Arcade was co-written by James and friend/backing-vocalist Rupert Morrisons. The pair, alongside drummer and acclaimed cartoonist Jock Simpson, “sat around listening to records, drinking red wine to get in the mood and did the take late in the evening”. The result is a deliberately hushed affair, full of restraint and subtlety, as the guitars chime like The Velvet Underground on the go-slow, and James’ vocals take on a pleasantly languorous quality, the surprisingly beefy tick of the drums seeming to be the only thing keeping the song moving at all. The lyrics seem to touch on the idea of escapism, of bending your worldview to make it work for you. While James notes the realities, “troubles ahead, hard to avoid, am I here, or lost in the void”, he seems like he’d rather live in the moment, “everything’s easy, everything’s easy can’t you see, everything’s easy, everything’s easy, let it be”. The resultant track does sound like it came fairly easy, a bit of red wine, some good friends and knock it out of the park with one of the best songs you’ve ever written, James noting, “it ended up coming out as I imagined initially in my head”. And that it’s turned out this good? Well, where James Hoare is concerned, what else did you expect?

Double Exposure is out April 17th via Tapete Records. For more information on Penny Arcade visit https://pennyarcade.bandcamp.com/

3. Amanda Is A Real (Broken Social) Scenester

It’s perhaps because Broken Social Scene albums don’t come along all that often that when they do, they’re quite so special. Since their 2001 debut, Feel Good Lost, the ever-changing Canadian collective have released just five of them, with 2017’s Hug of Thunder their most recent offering. Their upcoming sixth record came from a reunion even longer in the making after Kevin Drew met up with the producer of two of the band’s most acclaimed records, David Newfeld, for the first time in twenty years, with one hangout turning into “a hurricane of fun“, that demanded a musical expression. The connection was hammered home when during recording sessions for the record, they both lost their mothers, and that bond shaped the album, fittingly titled Remember The Humans. With the record set to arrive in May, this week, alongside dates for their co-headline All The Feelings tour with Metric and Stars, the band shared their latest single, Hey Amanda.

Hey Amanda is in many ways a classic Broken Social Scene track, with its mixture of cryptic lyrical snapshots and playful musical flourishes. It begins with a burble of processed strings, before seeming to resolve into a clearer picture as the opening guitar line and trilling horns give way to a vast choir of layered vocals. Within the references to the age-old hippy hate crime of cutting your hair and frog dissections, the lyrics seem to touch on the wider album theme of lost friend, “breaking a glass with the boys who died at home, drinking a flask with the ones who tried to go”. There’s a sense here of the band looking not to reinvent themselves, but to scratch the surface and dig deeper into what made them such a musical force in the first place, by looking back to where it all began Broken Social Scene might just have seen a path forward, one that might just take them on their most exciting journey yet.

Remember The Humans is out May 8th via City Slang. For more information on Broken Social Scene visit https://www.brokensocialscene.com/.

2. Pictish Trail Is Having The Slime Of His Life

As the boss of Lost Map Records and the man behind the Pictish Trail moniker, I could make a pretty good argument for Johnny Lynch being one of the most important figures in Scottish independent music today. His label has given us so many great records, and his own unclassifiable brand of musical exploration has never failed to intrigue. After 2022’s acclaimed Island Family, the isle of Eigg-based, “psychedelic folk ogre”, turned to acclaimed producer Mike Lindsay to help bring new album, Life Slime, to life. Ahead of the release next month via Fire Records, this week Johnny shared both the record’s title track and it’s accompanying video, an attempt to set an official Guinness World Record for “most slime poured over an individual during a music video performance”.

A counter-piece to the record’s lead single Hold It, which attempted to stop time, Life Slime, “sits with the finality of a relationship ending, and the collapse of identity and self-worth that follows“. The song seems to question what comes next when We gives way to I, “a weary sigh – not dramatic grief, just resignation. Acknowledging the ending, and whatever darkness comes with it“. If the Life Slime in question is metaphorical, musically the track is distinctly squelchy, as the gunky analogue synths create an oozing overlay to a song equal parts Orange Juice-swagger and Field Music-sheen. Amidst the gloop, Johnny’s vocals are contrastingly sharp, protesting just a bit too much about how wonderful things are, “this is fine, it’s alright, I’m going to die eventually”. Discussing the track, Johnny even references the influence of the meme of a cartoon dog calmly drinking his tea as the world burns, “an emotional disaster, fully aware of how bad it is, but too worn down to react”. With Johnny promising his, “most personal collection of songs to date”, Life Slime isn’t going to be a record that shies away from life, but with his skewed pop music sounding more joyous and, dare I say, fun than ever before, it might only be once you’ve worn yourself out dancing that you notice the slime oozing out the sides.

Life Slime is out April 10th via Fire Records. For more information on Pictish Trail visit https://pictishtrail.com/.

1. Oh Widowspeak, Please Never Change

The duo of Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas, Widowspeak have been making music for nearly two decades now, with their most recent release being 2022’s The Jacket. Things have changed a lot both within the band and the wider musical climate since they started out. Their old practice space is a Trader Joe’s, many of the venues they started playing shows at no longer exist, and the band themselves are now married, and working day jobs between tours as a waitress and a carpenter respectively. It’s the back drop of the repetition of everyday life that shapes their new album Roses, even if the album itself was made a long way from home on the Greek island of Hydra, synonymous with so much of Leonard Cohen’s output. Ahead of Roses’ arrival this summer, this week saw the band share their new single, If You Change.

A breezy slice of indie-pop beauty, Molly explains if you change was inspired by, “the fear of change, and when things feel stuck in time because of a fear of ruining them”, she likens it to the idea of mint condition in the sales world, “you always hear it as an asset, but it also means that thing hasn’t been used, lived with, loved. It never gets to fulfill its destiny”. The track initially comes in with an almost Kinks-like twang, before taking a trip towards the dreamy indie-pop of The Reds, Pinks & Purples or Alvvays. Particularly lovely is the audio spring bloom of the chorus, where the rolling guitar lines shimmer and Molly’s always stunning vocal pleads, “if you change, don’t change too much, keep it nice but don’t leave the plastic on”. Ultimately, perhaps this is a song about living life to the fullest, an ode to not fearing getting worn around the edges and embracing opportunity with open arms, so pull your Widowspeak record out of its wrapper and let the needle wear the grooves out; this is shaping up to be a record that deserves to be heard.

Roses is out June 5th via Captured Tracks. For more information on Widowspeak visit https://www.widowspeakforever.com/.

Header photo is Widowspeak by Alexa Viscius