Albums Of Half The Year 2024

26th June 2024

ALBUMS OF HALF THE YEAR 2024
Here’s some of our picks from the first half of 2024…
Check them out on our taster playlist

Beak – >>>>
This is the fourth Beak> studio album, imaginatively titled ‘>>>>’. At its core we always wanted it to be head music, listened to as an album, not as individual songs. This is why we are releasing this album with no upfront singles or promo tracks. The recording & writing initially began in a house called Pen Y Bryn in Talsarnau, Wales in the fall out from the weirdness of the covid days. Remote and with only ourselves and the view of Portmeirion in the distance we got to work. 

Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
After putting down the saxophone, the instrument he has become synonymous with, Shabaka returns with his first full length album under his own name. Expanding off the meditative 2022 EP Afrikan Culture, his new album Perceive its beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is a deeply moving suite of primarily instrumental music. The listening experience is reflective and contemplative, with passages flowering from one musical concept to the next, encouraging deep attention that rewards the listener with throughlines and motifs throughout the record. Shabaka is found playing the flute on this album, and has enlisted key artists such as Andre 3000, Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Floating Points, and more to help build this all-encompassing aural landscape.

The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know
Equipped with the songwriting chops of a lost era (somewhere between The Brill Building and 10452 Bellagio Road) the new record was carefully arranged and produced entirely analog in the brothers’ Brooklyn recording studio. Most of the tracks were constructed with the two brothers swapping instruments and layering all the parts themselves, but one exception to that rule was “In The Eyes Of The Girl,” which was co-produced by Sean Ono Lennon in his upstate New York studio.

Faye Webster – Underdressed At The Symphony
Faye Webster’s songs are direct lines to the human subconscious, and Underdressed at the Symphony documents what happens once you begin to build a new self from the ashes of your old routines. This rebirth isn’t flashy or definitive, but is instead a series of seemingly mundane moments that, scattered across weeks and months, sneak their way toward something like healing. Yes, there’s a breakup in play, but Webster is not documenting the heartbreak of a breakup so much as she’s navigating the contours of heartbreak itself.

The Smile – Wall Of Eyes
he Smile’s new album Wall Of Eyes, was released inn January on XL Recordings. The new album, was recorded between Oxford and Abbey Road Studios, and is produced and mixed Sam Petts-Davies. It features string arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Wall Of Eyes is the follow up their 2022 debut LP A Light For Attracting Attention

The Bevis Frond – Focus On Nature
Focus On Nature is the new studio album from celebrated post-psyche singer songwriter Nick Saloman and his band The Bevis Frond. Seventy-five minutes of glorious melodies that span 60s psych, English folk, Seattle art-punks The Wipers, the buzzsaw pop of Dinosaur Jr and Hendrix-esque explorations. There’s always an element of playful Englishness to their music.

Kneecap – Fine Art
Built on a West Belfast side street, The Rutz is a community boozer, in that the entire community uses it. All human life is inside, either thriving, striving or skiving. There’s people just trying to get served at the bar or up on the stage performing; others are slumped in darkened corners or emerging bleary eyed and coke smeared from the toilets. Religious affiliations are irrelevant and the chatter is a intoxicating blur of English and Irish.

Lucy Rose – This Ain’t The Way You Go Out
This Ain’t The Way You Go Out is an album constructed from the ashes of despair, nurturing the tiniest of green shoots and giving life to something that had looked otherwise spent. It’s a new era for Lucy, and an era in its purest, truest sense. An artist re-awakening herself to the power of music, and having a lot of fun in the process of its discovery and delivery.

Lauran Hibberd – Girlfriend Material
Life, as Ronan Keating famously once sang, is a rollercoaster – you’ve just got to ride it. Over the last 12 months, Lauran Hibberd been strapped into a journey resembling hurtling along a loop-the-looping track, being thrown up to dizzying highs before plummeting to life-changing lows and back again.

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly – Mestizx
MESTIZX is Bolivian-born singer and multi-medium performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and renowned Chicago expat jazz drummer Frank Rosaly’s debut album as co-composers, arrangers and musicians.