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5. Adam Ross’ Triple Negative Has A Lost Of Positives

Hailing from the North-East of Scotland, Adam Ross is both a revered solo artist, under his own name and his vocoder country-pop pseudonym A.R. Pinewood, as well as being the band leader of cult concern Randolph’s Leap, who have released music through Fence Records, Lost Map and Adam’s current home, Fika Recordings. The debut Adam Ross album, Staring At Mountains, arrived in 2022, quickly followed by 2024’s Littoral Zone. After the C. Duncan-featuring stand-alone single, Drink The First Light, Adam recently announced his upcoming third album, Bring On The Apathy, which was previewed this week with his new single, I Never Thought You Couldn’t Not.

Recorded, like all of Bring On The Apathy, direct to tape with audio engineer and tape-recording specialist Samuel J. Smith, I Never Thought You Couldn’t Not is the sound of Adam at his most sprightly, as bounding drums combine with flourishes of piano and violin, creating a distinctly poppy number equal parts Lloyd Cole and Hamish Hawk. Lyrically, it’s a track that finds Adam at his most bitingly cynical, exploring, “a feeling of alienation in the modern world”, as he contrasts the hyper-assertive short-form social-media content of our age with his own lack of,“certainty and confidence”. The song is something of a tumble of ideas, snippets from Adam’s “ever-evolving notes document on my phone”, rearranged, “until it felt right”. Despite that, it feels surprisingly coherent, like a collage of similar ideas that find a greater meaning when they adhere to a single page. Apathetic and cynical, maybe, but Adam Ross seems to be inviting us to look beneath the surface, to see that in the age of immediacy, those who express themselves in more nuanced ways are often the ones you really need to listen to.

Bring On The Apathy is out May 15th via Fika Recordings. For more information on Adam Ross visit https://www.adamrossmusic.co.uk/

4. There’s No Time Like The Present To Listen To Zoh Amba

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of place in music, how where we grew up and where we are now affects how we perceive the world, tying us to places we often had little say in ending up in. I feel perhaps like Zoh Amba might be a kindred spirit in this respect. Raised in the mountain towns of Tennessee, Zoh left almost as soon as they could, heading to first San Francisco and then New York, finding home always drew them back, noting, “when you try to run from something it ends up catching up to you”. An acclaimed avant-garde saxophonist, in their music, Zoh kept coming back to their hometown, Kingsport and their first instrument, the guitar. Both are writ large across Zoh’s upcoming debut release for Matador Records, Eyes Full, a record recorded in Asheville, but forged in the theology of the Bible Belt.

Ahead of the album’s June release, this week Zoh shared the first single from it, Another Time. While it’s still led by Zoh’s acoustic guitar, Another Time is no stripped bare singer-songwriter number, as they’re joined by wiry slashes of electric guitar and pattering country-tinged drums that are sure to appeal to fans of Big Thief or Conor Oberst’s Mystic Valley Band era. Particularly engaging is Zoh’s impassioned vocal howl, letting that Tennessee drawl ring out as they seem to address a friend who has got lost along the way, lamenting, “all your dreams that went astray”. There’s a hint of being wronged as Zoh sings, “after all that time, you filled my mind with lies”, but the overarching feeling is of wanting the best for someone you know is hurting, “in another lifetime, I’ll take you to the sea, show you honey, how sweet that soul’s meant to be”. A sparkling introduction to where Eyes Full could take us, Zoh Amba’s shaping up to be a name you hear an awful lot more of as this year rolls on.

Eyes Full is out June 5th via Matador Records. For more information on Zoh Amba visit https://www.zoh-amba.com/.

3. Here’s The Pitch – Listen To Mildred

Regular readers of the blog will probably be bored with hearing me bang on about Mildred by now. Short of erecting a reasonably sized shrine, I couldn’t do much more to bring your attention to the four-headed Oakland wonders. Their debut album, Fenceline, out next week via Memorials Of Distinction/Dog Day Records, follows hot on the heels of their two excellent 2025 EPs, Mild & Red. Ahead of the release, the band shared one final taste of it, in the shape of the Henry Easton Koehler penned single, Pitch Boats.

Although the band obviously liked the track enough to make it a single, Henry was initially unsure about the track he wrote on a drive back from his grandparents’ house, “it felt cheap to me or something; the way that it came together so quickly and had this nostalgic feeling I wasn’t necessarily aiming for”. Thankfully, his bandmates persuaded him it was worthwhile exploring. The resultant track certainly maintains some of that initial feeling Henry railed against, as he notes, “the accompanying guitar and piano bits remind me of a kid learning to play a broken instrument, which feels fitting for this song“. What stops it short of being a saccharine paean to some never-existent golden age is the band of musical brothers quality present in so much of Mildred’s music, as they combine to lift Henry’s vocal up, creating a rich musical backing in the mould of Friendship or Sluice. Backing vocals swell around him, and perfectly judged drums tick and bounce, as he gets dewy eyes at both how life changes, “the ditch is dried up, they put the water underground”, and how it stays the same, “I’m a ghost of some little kid sneaking sodas from the shed”. The final product is something beautiful, an ode to memory that never gets too stuck in the past, like a dream about your childhood rudely awoken by the alarm that signals it’s time to get back to the here and now, and if a Mildred record is playing, at least the here and now is a very beautiful place to be.

Fenceline is out April 24th via Memorials Of Distinction / Dog Day Records. For more information on Mildred visit https://linktr.ee/mildredband

2. Forget Jesus, Praise Emperor X Instead

In the nearly thirty years Chad Matheny has been performing as Emperor X, he has always been straddling worlds. An American now based in Berlin, a singer-songwriter and a punk rocker, a chronicler of both the personal and the overtly political. His latest record, Unified Field, arguably leans towards both the political and the distinctly European. The record was written and recorded in Ukraine, a logistical nightmare but an “aesthetic emergency” as he called upon his many friends in the country, following his gut and, “a strong instinct that the record would come out better, and be more meaningful, if I did it with my friends who also lived their lives under fire”. The result is a reminder that in Ukraine, “life continues. They still have shows, they still make records, they still go to work, they still meet at cafes, they still love and have babies and gossip and experience absurd situations to which wry laughter is the only rational response”.

Ahead of the record release this Summer via Bar/None, this week Emperor X shared the latest taster of it, the unabashed protest song, Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan! The song is a Mountain Goats-like clap back at “so-called Christian nationalism”, from a songwriter who grew up in the churches where it took root. Here he takes aim at the “Bible-twisting schtick” used to justify, “anti-migrant and neo-imperialist America First policies”, while ignoring the book’s other passages which speak of, “compassion and universalism and the strength of humility”. The track pictures a migrant at border control, pleading for help and finding the gates closed to people like her, “you’re from a place that’s on this list they handed out, so you’re not worth saving, I know you’ll die before your time and I hate to see it, but it’s not my problem, praises Jesus!” If the misinterpretation of one mans’ reported words are an obvious contrast to modern American values, Reagan is perhaps a less obvious figure for celebration, as Chad argues we’ve moved away from the sliver of humanity even Reagan possessed. His claims for American exceptionalism were built on the idea of open doors, “to anyone with the will and the heart to get here”. America could once claim to be exceptional when it welcomed all comers to share in its fortunate bounty, but those ideas hold no water when you’ve drawn up the bridge to protect the interests of those inside the castle, “I know your baby’s sick and we stole every doctor on the planet, but it’s not my problem goddammit!”

Unified Field is out June 26th via Bar/None. For more information on Emperor X visit https://crmatheny.net/.

1. Faith Eliott Is On Fire

Minneapolis-born and now Scotland-based, Faith Eliott caught the ears of many with last year’s Scottish Album Of The Year-nominated record Dryas. Put out through Lost Map, the record was rich in metaphor, burying human emotions in everything from “the Holocene glacial retreat” to “an endangered mollusc“. One track from those same sessions never quite fit, though; it was too straight talking, too direct, too unapologetically angsty. It was also too good to leave unreleased, and thankfully this week it was, as Faith shared their new single, named after a genuine new headline, There’s a cargo ship full of luxury cars on fire in the atlantic ocean.

The track is Faith’s moment to scream, “I’M OVERWHELMED”, their step into, “the school of Kimya Dawson or Jeffrey Lewis“, to let out an anti-folk howl about the state of the world from a place of, “post-covid internet fatigue”. The song almost never came out, as Faith’s musical interests moved onto other things, they decided it was now or never to honour a moment. The track has also become something of a live favourite with its big sing-along outro, “I imagine a sort of Wickerman closing scene with everyone holding hands and singing ‘lalala’ around a big horrible bonfire of Lamborghinis“. Musically, the track is delightfully bare, as just voice and acoustic guitar create an intimate setting for Faith’s vocals, with only the odd blast of lo-fi electronics for company. The whole thing really lets the stream-of-consciousness lyrics shine, as Faith takes aim at consumerism and the overwhelming, never-off world of the internet, when Faith found themself at 4am contemplating climbing through the screen of their laptop to escape into the abyss of the glacier they were looking at on Google Maps. The song reaches a conclusion of sorts, with the luxury car engines exploding like fireworks, “a ritual sacrifice made on the altar of full automation, total control, the grinding inertia of infinite growth”. From there, the song doesn’t end, it just floats out, a choir of voices suddenly sounding more human than ever join Faith in a wordless chorus, battling against the all encompassing electrical buzz and the crackle of flames. A reminder perhaps that sometimes for something new to take root, something else has to burn, and if that happens to be a ship full of luxury cars, who are we to stand in the way of what Mother Nature wants?

There’s a cargo ship full of luxury cars on fire in the atlantic ocean is out now via Lost Map. For more information on Faith Eliott visit https://linktr.ee/FaithEliott

Header photo is Faith Eliott by Flannery O’Kafka