I’ve lost count of the amount of times I wrote “Produced by Dan Auerbach” here when describing an album. Yola‘s “Stand For Myself” is another of those. Her debut record, “Walk Through Fire”, was gaining serious traction when the pandemic hit, robbing her of well deserved high profile shows and festival slots – but not for long. Fresh off a Newport Folk Festival slot, this might be the possible songwriter’s dream summer.
Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay’s second album as LUMP is our recommendation of the week. It can be easy to dismiss these songs as scraps from whatever doesn’t find their way into Marling’s “main” albums. But those ideas, coupled with Lindsay’s marvellous synth work, come to have a life of their own here, and “Animal” has some of the best tracks we’ve heard from both musicians in a while.
Mega Bog’s new record is our album of the week. If you know her work – we were all over her previous album, “Dolphine”, back in 2019 – you know exactly what to expect; if not, well, if you’re into exquisite songwriting (think Cate Le Bon or Helena Deland), this might just be your jam.
This week we feature the Canadian singer-songwriter Dana Sipos. Her new album, “The Astral Plane”, was produced by Sandro Perri, and it’s one of our favourite folk records of 2021 so far.
We took a week off because we can. It gave us a few extra days to dive deeper into Snapped Ankles’ excellent “Forest of Your Problems”. The noisy London post-punk (if we can define it like that…) band refines their sound further, bringing us some hip-moving motorik we can use to pretend the world is back to normal and we can all dance again. Responsibly.