Further Listening HERE

5. Dovetailed Are Right Up My Street

Although Dovetailed are entirely new to me, the members of the band certainly aren’t. Primarily a collaboration between Kim Grant, aka Raveloe, and Simon Liddell of Frightened Rabbit and Poster Paints, Dovetailed initially formed over email, with Simon sending instrumentals via email for Kim to sing over. They eventually started working together in person and released their debut single Kitchen back in May. The well-received offering was the first taste of the duo’s debut EP, out soon via Lost Map, and further previewed this week by their latest track, Kethers Street.

Discussing Kethers Street, Kim suggests the track is, “something like a patchwork of memory, a reflection on what’s been“, including a particularly trippy childhood experience with anaesthesia, “I remember it was like all my senses became the colour purple”. Musically, they suggest the track, “is probably our most live-band-sounding song”, including a particularly noteworthy wall of sound created by a series of overdriven guitars, “myself, Simon and (drummer) Jonny (Scott) all had a go at putting down a riff and ended up keeping them all in“. While it’s similarly musically expansive, Kethers Street is almost the opposite of big sky alt-country; instead, it feels close, like one of those days where the clouds seem to float barely above the buildings, so low and foreboding you feel like you could almost touch them. Amid the bruised, unmoving sky of guitar and drums, Kim’s feels contrastingly spry, mixed relatively low it hard to make out the words, yet nonetheless it shimmers, a flittering tumble of words and melodies urgently seeking an escape. While these are, of course, early days for Dovetailed, they do seem to have stumbled onto something rather magical, a fusion of lo-fi homemade intimacy and widescreen production sheen that might just see them make like their namesake and fly.

Kethers Street is out now via Lost Map. For more information on Dovetailed visit https://www.instagram.com/dovetailedband/

4. Hollow Hand Is Turning Out Great

Hollow Hand, ostensibly the solo endeavours of Brighton’s Max Kinghorn-Mills, has been releasing music since 2015, most recently with 2023’s Your Own Adventure. Since then Max has been busy, becoming the house band for Caitlin Rose’s tour, collaborating and touring with Aoife Nessa Frances and supporting MJ Lenderman on a sold-out European jaunt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Max came back more than a little inspired, “it creates a feeling that you want to do better. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m going through the motions, so I decided to start again“. He scrapped the work he’d begun on his new album and created an entirely different version, moving away from his comfort zone as a bedroom producer and into the world of a full band. He brought on board drummer Oliver Newton and bassist Leo Clarke, opened up his sound to other people’s ideas and formed Hollow Hand into a proper band. The result is the upcoming record Wish Road South, out in September via Loose Music / Soundly, which Max previewed this week with the new single, I Turned My Back On The World.

I Turned My Back On The World finds Max in a reflective mood, transporting us back to his childhood spent on the Cornish coast, “when I sing this song I think of the sea, my parents, my brother & sister,” Max explains. “Cornwall, our orange VW camper van, reading fantasy books & comics with my brother in camp sites. Body boarding in the sea, the salt, the air, the sun going down gently on a Cornish street”. While they’re happy memories, they’re tinged with sadness for something lost in growing older, “if I think about it too hard it seems to make me sad, so instead I let just a little of that into my life when I need it most”. If the lyrics are distinctly wistful, the music is arguably even more so, with a shuffling Ultimate Painting-like drum rhythm and languid guitar leading us on an Autumnal meander through long-lost feelings. In the fine tradition of English songwriting about the weather, Max offers us pretty much anything but sunshine, from the Cornish wind, through to clouds that seem to loom as much in his mind as they do in the low-hanging sky, “now that the clouds are back, it’s just a different point of view”. For a song laced with stiff-upper-lip melancholy, I Turned My Back On The World ends with a contrasting flash of if not optimism, at least an acceptance that things were, and perhaps could again, be good, “sitting on the beach again, help it was so easy then, hey hey hey…such a perfect day”. In his own subtle way, here Hollow Hand offers the sound of real progress, a musician stepping contrastingly back into the world and finding it loaded with opportunity.

Wish Road South is out September 4th via Loose Music / Soundly. For more information on Hollow Hand visit https://www.instagram.com/hollowhand.

3. Biita Houdei Is Ground For Greatness

Having previously released under the alias Le’ponds, Biita Houdei has been making music for a while, but only recently decided to put her own name to it. The name itself is relatively new to her as well, Biita being a name gifted to her by her auntie, and meaning unique in the Farsi language, something Biita took on with pride, “it makes me feel that much closer to my Persian heritage”. The first release of this new chapter will arrive in September, with the debut Biita Houdei album, This Bed Was Made For Me, a bed she can now adorn with a blanket laboriously crafted from patches made for each track on the record as a sign of her, “physical commitment to make a full work of art”. Ahead of the album’s release, this week Biita shared the latest track from it, The Ground Here.

Featuring guitar work from Big Thief’s Buck Meek, The Ground Here finds Biita longing not for times gone by, but places. Lyrically, the track explores themes of nature and the pull of home, inspired by a move to Topanga, California, “a landscape that is undeniably beautiful, where many people are happy to reside“, but not one that appealed to Biita, who, “longed for natural bodies of water and the simple rainstorm“, and the seasons that California barely has and, “help me savour nature more deeply“. If the song is a desert dweller longing for a river, that’s matched in the music too. The song enters with a Tenci-like acoustic guitar that sounds like it’s been out in the sun all day, concocting images of scorched red clay cracking in front of your eyes. Just as you find yourself subconsciously reaching for your water bottle, though, there’s a change. The pace picks up, a cloud forms on the horizon, shoots of verdant grass start to poke through, and Biita enters, lamenting that, “the hills have all burned down” and pleading, “may the river wash me out”. The slow-building nature of the track brings to mind early Fleet Foxes, the way they’d piece the puzzle together so gradually that you’d only suddenly notice you’re surrounded by gently cacophonous walls of harmony and instrumental swell. There’s a real confidence to Biita’s songwriting here; with this new album she seems unafraid to let it take seed, sprout and swell with growth and bountiful possibility.

This Bed Was Made For Me is out September 18th via Father / Daughter Records / Basin Rock. For more information on Biita Houdei visit https://biitahoudei.com/

2. Sulka Is All Carrot No Stick

A member of my 21 for 2021, Sulka is essentially a vehicle for the solo songwriting of Glasgow-based multi-instrumentalist, Lukas Clasen. That year Lukas released Take Care, a pandemic-made blast of slacker-noise that effortlessly captured the angst and anger we were all living with then. It was perhaps a result of that record’s forced bedroom aesthetic that the follow-up, 2023’s Distractions, was such a change of scenery. It was the first Sulka music recorded in a studio with a full live band, and with an external producer. If the nature of Take Care begat Distractions, perhaps the nature of Distractions begat his upcoming album, Bute. Left a little cold by the big studio experience, Lukas went back to his roots: just himself, a flat in Bute overlooking the sea, and the vulnerability of putting his own ideas onto the tape. With Bute out next week, this week Lukas shared the latest single from it, Carrot.

The inspiration for Carrot came at the end of a walk on Bute, which ended, like all the best walks, at the pub, where Lukas met, “an old couple who had retired there. They told me about their old lives in Glasgow and asked me questions about my life and what the city was like now. The wife had dementia and would repeat a lot of questions“. The resultant track aims to, “present a picture of life as a whole, and questions the direction I’m going in“, the titular carrot presenting as something dangling behind Lukas, as he’s prevented from moving forward, “not letting myself be guided by new opportunities“. As you’d perhaps expect for a record that swaps Glasgow for Bute, Carrot is a distinctly more spacious offering than Sulka’s previous material, with the acoustic guitars delivered with a lightness of touch that’s a perfect fit for Lukas’ songwriting that has always had a thoughtfulness woven through it. The lyrics show a classic songwriter’s touch as he takes the stories he learnt from others and brands them onto his own experience, “for your hits and for your misses what you got to show? All my life is flashing for my eyes”. Sulka has always made music that has rewarded repeat listens, and this feels no different. With Bute, he’s made an antidote to the hustle and bustle of modern living; now that might not be how you get noticed in the current landscape, but perhaps it’s how you get people to stick around. Take the carrot, you won’t regret where it leads you.

Bute is out July 17th via Lost Map. For more information on Sulka visit https://linktr.ee/Sulka.music

1. Holy Wave Put The Dad in DADA

Something of a fixture on the ever-reliable music scene of Austin, Texas, Mexican-American quartet Holy Wave appeared on these pages back in 2023 when I premiered their debut release for Suicide Squeeze, Cowprint. That release was followed latest that year by the excellent album Five of Cups, a record that explored sadness, euphoria and how the two often aren’t as distant as they might appear. Three years on, the band return with their latest offering, i’m DADA, which they further previewed this week with the release of the brilliant title track.

Described by band member Kyle Hager as, “a song about balance“, i’m DADA is perhaps less avant-garde art movement and more nursery drop-off, as he explains, “to be a good parent, I believe one should continue to follow their passions as a form of self-care and a source of balance. In this song, I vent about the pressures of being in demand as a parent and also try to forgive myself for wanting to be more than just DADA”. While the lyrics are see-sawing between commitments, the music feels decidedly single-minded, as the drums lock into a motorik rhythm, the guitars squeal with distant feedback and an array of bleeps and bloops add deliciously spacy textures, like the middle ground of The Secret Machines and Stereolab. While they might be too tired to notice, any parent, or indeed anyone who has ever felt the pull to be two places at once, will understand the dilemma of investing in yourself when you’re always needed somewhere else, “feed your mind, hit your stride, baby cried, come inside, Mama tried, you can’t hide”. In a hectic world, Holy Wave seem to know the cost and reward of doing what they love. To make music requires a certain dedication and sacrifice in other aspects of your life; only they will really know if it was worth it, but when it comes out sounding this good, that’s definitely a tick in the right column,

i’m DADA is out now via Suicide Squeeze Records. For more information on Holy Wave visit https://linktr.ee/holywavetx

Header photo is Holy Wave by Holy Wave