Zuzanna Pazola

JOYCE MANOR  has always thrived on compression; not just short songs, but compressed emotions and ideas, whole messy inner lives flattened into something you can shout along to in under two minutes. I Used To Go To This Bar  leans fully into that instinct, arriving as another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it record that still feels considered, self-aware, and quietly confident in what the band does best. Clocking in at nine tracks with not a single one crossing the three-minute mark, the album...

For the past 25 years, WHEATUS have been living with the strange blessing and curse of writing a song that never goes away. Rather than shy away from it, they have turned their ‘25th Anniversary’ tour into a celebration of the debut album that started it all, playing it in full each night and filling the rest of the set with whatever the room feels like hearing. The result was a loose, charming night that felt as much like a neighbourhood party as a gig. The evening opened with THOMAS...

BAD SAM’s new album Trauma lands with the force of a derailed freight train, all jagged metal and unfiltered rage, but what sits underneath all that racket is a pair of artists who have spent decades turning chaos into craft. The Newport duo, consisting of DEAN BEDDIS and RICHARD GLOVER, have stripped back their operation down to its barest components: one voice carved out of social frustration and lived history, and one musician responsible for the dense, warped engine driving everything...