Further Listening – HERE
5. Someone Give Mesh Atrophy Already
Back in 2021, Philadelphia’s Mesh shared their debut EP, sold out multiple pressings of it, won plenty of acclaim from the online underground and then seemingly disappeared for five years. Like many bands at this level, that’s not quite the whole story. They kept gigging around their local scene, toured a lot and quietly honed their craft. The results of that labour arrive this month with the release of their debut album, No Fun At At All, a record that thankfully doesn’t live up to its name. Ahead of the release this week, the band shared the latest single from it, Atrophy.
Listening to Atrophy, there’s something wonderfully timeless about the music Mesh make, Allison Durham’s yelp-sing vocals sitting atop a clatter of thudding bass, snare slapping and the all-jangle interplay of 12-string/6-string guitars. They’re bound to draw a lot of comparisons with the classic 80s indie sound of bands like The Feelies and the Flying Nun stable, but they could just have easily borrowed the ideas from more contemporary purveyors of the art like The Goon Sax or pretty much everyone who released stuff on the much-missed Trouble In Mind label. Wherever their inspirations come from, Mesh do that most intangible thing that all the best bands do: they stamp their influences with their own unique brand; they sound like everyone and no one all at once and deserve a cherished spot in your collection just for that.
No Fun At All is out July 24th via Feel It Records. For more information on Mesh visit https://meshphilly.bandcamp.com/.
4. Are Superfriends Great? You Do The Moths
Hailing from Brighton, Superfriends’ story is one almost as old as music itself. Two school friends, Harry Atkinson and Jake Hughes, sat in their childhood bedrooms and, “after years of moshing together at DIY gigs looked up at the stage and thought – Hey, I bet we could do that!”. Now expanded to a four-piece with the addition of Matt Johnson (no, not either of those ones) and Marc Riley (no, not that one either), the band are finally ready to unleash their magnum opus, or at least their debut album, King Of The Moths. With the album arriving next month, this week they shared the de facto title track, Moths.
Opening with a blast of janky guitars, Moths is not a track that finds Superfriends wasting any time. The whole thing has a deliriously unhinged quality, reminiscent of the likes of Adults or the Bug Club, as the band fuse breakneck guitar clatter with moments of unguarded emotional honesty, “I don’t wanna be a person anymore, someone tell me how to turn this thing off. Only had four minor breakdowns today, guess I earned my licence to cry”. While at times the track has an unmistakable air of everything becoming overwhelming, at others Harry seems to see a glimmer of, if not quite optimism, perhaps hope in the little things, as a slacker-ish breakdown offers him a chance to, “find new ways of control, practice til they’re not fears at all”. The song ends, fittingly, without conclusion, just Harry and his favourite lepidoptera for company, “I’m hanging with the moths and my thoughts”. They might not be their King just yet, but Superfriends are at least offering the misunderstood insects a soundtrack worthy of their wonder.
King Of The Moths is out August 28th. For more information on Superfriends visit https://linktr.ee/superfriendstheband
3. Lou Terry Is Just Twitching To Share His New Music With You
Something of a regular on these pages, South London’s Lou Terry has slowly been carving out a niche in the UK’s DIY landscape. Following on from his brilliant 2024 debut, Building A Case, Lou is set to return in September with a new record, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Spectacle, coming out on the Divine Schism label. Ahead of the album’s release, this week Lou shared his, “parable for modern masculinity and grief”, Wading Birds.
While it’s something of a montage of events, taking in everything from a Dad shouting at his son for missing an open goal to, “scenes of bench-pressing a pool table in the Wagon and Horses”. Throughout Lou seems to ask us to offer, “tenderness and care as a means of approaching the fragility of masculinity, which after all is born from the brutality of the world”. Particularly striking is the heartbreaking scene where Lou looks into the front room of his friend Jimmy, somehow detecting something odd in the scene of, “flat holsten pills” and “raid wasp killer”, only with hindsight the telltale leftovers of Jimmy’s substance-induced passing. Musically, this is Lou at his most sparse, the voice accompanied by little more than an absent-minded guitar meander and flourishes of almost jazzy percussion, bringing to mind the likes of fellow lovable musical oddballs, Kiran Leonard or Richard Dawson. Further evidence to the growing dossier of reasons to think Lou Terry is a musical maverick just waiting for an audience to discover him and cherish his wonderful music.
Animal, Vegetable, Minderal, Spectacle is out Setpermber 22nd via Divine Schism. For more information on Lou Terry visit https://linktr.ee/LouTerry
2. Koleżanka Is A Mechanical Marvel
Back in 2023, Koleżanka, aka New York-based musician Kristina Moore, released the fabulous Alone With The Sound The Mind Makes, an album I had the pleasure of talking to Kristina about, and one that looked destined to see her music reach the much wider audience it thoroughly deserved. 2023, though, had a distinct sting in the tail, when Kristina severed a flexor tendon in her left finger, forcing her to leave a well-deserved lap of honour for months of surgery, recovery and uncertainty of what range of motion would be available afterwards. Refusing to be creatively stifled, Kristina decided to play through it, starting work on the tracks that would become her upcoming album Zone 2. She would write one-handed at the piano, mapping out future guitar parts using synths and generally making it work. With the album arriving this September, this week Kristina shared the latest single from it, Levers and Pulleys.
Something of a poster-child for Zone 2’s one-handed era, Levers and Pulleys was written, “a few days before my surgery”, on a borrowed keyboard where she would sit for hours playing, “a lot of nothing leading to nowhere”, until, “something stuck…and I ran with it”. The song has been through many iterations since then, the original one-hand-two-keyboard parts, replaced thankfully, and triumphantly, by, “both hands for recording” as Kristina recovered well from surgery. It’s not just the music that seems inspired by this period. The lyrics also speak of the process of learning to trust your own body again, “learning anatomy
levers and pulleys”, as Kristina revels in the wonders and fragility of a human body. For a song with such stark beginnings, the finished product is anything but austere, as the early soundings of synth and vocal are later adorned with guitars, drums and gorgeously layered near-choral vocals. The melting point of disparate ideas, bringing to mind the likes of Dana Gavanski or Cate Le Bon. Named after the area she injured in her hand, Zone 2 is a record that wears its working on the outside, a record that’s not just about success but also the process of getting back to it, a roller coaster journey from the lowest ebb to the highest high, delivered in the beautiful sonic stitches that make Koleżanka so wonderfully unique.
Zone 2 is out September 18th. For more information on Koleżanka visit https://kolezanka.bandcamp.com/.
1. Homework Are Made For This
Hailing from Glasgow, Homework are a quartet based around the songwriting duo of Michael Newton and Santiago Taberna, with rhythm section Lizzie Quirke and Andrew Gordon. They first appeared in 2024 with the Easy Money EP. Two years on, they’ve got a freshly penned deal with Meritorio Records, and a debut album, Bang Here If Stuck, on the way in September. Ahead of the release, this week saw Homework share the first single from the record, Made.
Recorded at Chime Studios in Glasgow with Melissa Brisbane, Made, like all of Bang Here If Stuck, was tracked live, “to best capture the playful spontaneity of their gigs — the sense that anything could happen and probably will”. While Made certainly has some touchstones in the American underground of the 1990’s, there’s also something distinctly Glaswegian at work here, tapping into the city’s gritty artisticness, mined by everyone from Orange Juice to Savage Mansion. This is the sound of low clouds that seems to last for miles, and the slight chink of light that gets through and is all the more welcome for its rareness, as bright guitars cut through a delicious melodic haze. Lyrically, the song seems to touch on those small victories, life’s pay cheques and moments when your name’s in lights, the micro wins that don’t last half as long as the memories of them do. Homework might never be on Top Of The Pops or fill Glasgow’s equivalent of Carnegie Hall, but you can’t take away the small victories, like being track of the week on a blog some people read occasionally – that’s a form of making it right?
Bang Here If Stuck is out September 25th via Meritorio Records. For more information on Homework visit https://homeworktunez.bandcamp.com/.
Header photo is Homework courtesy of the band
