I’ve never taken to audiobooks, but I’m a sucker for musical narrative. With a fourth album on the way, Lord Huron’s extensive universe of characters and landscapes is due to continue, meaning I need never bother downloading Audible for a free trial. Upon e-meeting the band’s frontman, Ben Schneider, it’s clear that metaphors and alternative perspectives are embedded in his way of thinking.
“Waiting to put a record out is like… I don’t know what it’s like being pregnant, but I feel like it’s like that: where you just can’t wait to get it out in the world and let people meet your creation.”
Through Zoom, I can practically see the storyboards in his mind drafting the experience of a mother to be – admittedly something of a tangent from the dead men and cosmonauts we’ve been introduced to on their previous records. As for Long Lost, the fourth of Lord Huron’s LPs, ghosts return in a setting closer to home than usual.

“I guess the genesis for this record was it started in our studio, Whispering Pines,” Ben explains. “We’ve been working there for the past seven years, did our last three records there – it’s kind of like our clubhouse.

“It’s this great old studio built in the early ’70s; we took it over after it had been abandoned for about 25 years, so it’s filled with all this old outdated gear that we had to strip out and rebuild. It’s a beautiful space.

“We’ve always wondered about who had worked there before us,” he continues. “We found a little information, but there’s not much. So, we started imagining who’d gone through there and created these characters of old showbiz folks who’d come in and out of [the studio], and what they’d done there.

“Then I started writing songs from their perspectives: I find it really useful to create avatars to write songs through, sometimes just as a way to change up my perspective. I always like to start with something that’s personal, but then look at it a different way – through the eyes of a different type of person...

The Mercury Prize winner was announced on The One Show last night.

September: now six months since Bojo clamped down on all things fun and populated, and gig-less we remain. In half a year, no one has felt the bass of a speaker thud across their chest, nor begrudgingly sacrificed next month’s rent for a pint of ‘whatever’s cheapest’. Withdrawal symptoms settled in across the nation: better hearing, fewer crowd-induced bruises… nasty stuff, really. Thankfully, just before bucket hats began to see a new life as makeshift face coverings, we were gifted a taste of what once was.
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The Mercury Prize Album of the Year is an annual excuse for any British melomaniac to spend the night in with a few drinks, a few mates and quite literally some of the finest new music around. While watching the ceremony often risks major audience-envy as the crowd screams applause after each set, this year was significantly more personal to watch. Naturally, live performances were out of the question, but many of the shortlisted artists were able to deliver pre-recorded sets specifically for the BBC’s coverage of the event: an hour-long compilation of these performances, presented by Lauren Laverne and uploaded to iPlayer. Not a bad deal, all in all – in fact, many of the videos made it feel like I was standing at the front row of an actual gig, too engrossed by the musicians to notice anyone else around. It’s as close to a concert as I’m getting, anyway, so here are the highlights from The Mercury Prize 2020.

Just before the release of her second album, Donna Missal sat down for a strikingly honest conversation about her career so far.

“I’m really excited by the concept that people change.”

Within minutes of our conversation, American songwriter, singer and musician, Donna Missal, reveals herself to be as intriguing, profound and promising as this one statement. At the time of our call, she was also merely a week away from releasing her second album, lighter.  

“I definitely feel like a totally different person from when I was writing my first record – and I would hope so! You’re allowed to do things differently, to think differently, change your mind, grow and come to understand things in a new way through perspective and through life experience.”
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The new record introduces a greater level of cohesion and vulnerability compared to her 2018 debut, This Time. Turning to music to get through a difficult time, lighter brought Donna perspective and relief as she poured out her feelings – it’s no wonder, then, that it all came together relatively quickly.

​The world is bored. I am bored. So bored, in fact, that I’ve been watching horror films just to feel something besides the monotony of my new existence (cheerful, eh?). When that failed, I turned to nostalgia, a bittersweet remedy which many of us will have pulled upon of late: the film we once knew line-by-line; the playlist that soundtracked last summer; the Monopoly board reeking of Christmas fallouts.
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A strong contender for my favourite TV shows, GIRLS was what I returned to… again. I like to consider it a sort of Sex & The City for twenty-somethings who don’t have it figured out yet. Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna were my Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda: relatable, honest, funny and also (as chance would have it) living in NYC. The lines are iconic, the characters are as unique and complicated as you can imagine, and – needless to say – the music is also a fucking treat...

I was almost nervous to hear this new record. Sometimes, after months of teasing with studio clips and new singles, a long-awaited album can come off anticlimactic – as with pres and the club itself, the hype can feel better than the main event. It was stupid to think this could be the case for HAIM: it seems these sisters have a knack for consistently outdoing themselves.

On their third and most exceptional album yet, Women In Music Pt. III (dubbed wimpiii) sees HAIM delve even deeper into stark honesty and emotional vulnerability: ‘I Know Alone’, ‘Now I’m In It’ and ‘I’ve Been Down’ carry a similar theme of depression, while ‘Hallelujah’ depicts the grief of losing a childhood friend. Although their prior records have often portrayed HAIM’s emotions in a raw and candid manner, wimpiii sees the band truly open up through lyrics that cut true for musician and listener alike:‘Days get slow like counting cell towers on the road / I know alone and I don’t wanna talk about it’.
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The record takes time, too, to address wider issues such as sexism: ‘Man From The Magazine’ calls out the misogyny of the music industry, namely in the comments made towards female artists...

In case you forgot, or have been mining in Central America and somehow missed the news entirely, Sex Education returned to Netflix last Friday, 17 January 2020. For most of us, though, the show’s season two release date was marked in our calendars long before we remembered it was also someone’s birthday. Sorry Gran.

The show’s first season was praised for its honesty and inclusivity, approaching the deliciously awkward world of teenage sex in following the humility and hilarity encountered in its characters’ bedrooms. Covering sexual identities, desires, troubles and mistakes, Sex Education manages to tackle each question of ‘who am I?’ with poise, acceptance and – above all – humour.

Despite better intentions to savour the new season and its encompassing joy, I binged it. Like a small child wolfing down an entire Easter egg in one sitting, I gave in to self-indulgence and now it’s over too soon. Or so we thought.

​As announced earlier this week, Ezra Furman is here to prolong our Sex Education high with today’s release of the show’s official soundtrack...

From the off-set, Krystal sees Matt Maltese settle even further into the piano bar melancholy we fell in love with in Bad Contestant. Early ivory twinkles give the illusion of a cheerful, happy-go-lucky performer, one likely to burst suddenly into a cane-aided tap routine, but the sombre themes beneath this rosy surface remain the same: heartache, nostalgia, more heartache.

While much of the album carries Matt’s distinctive hotel-lounge sound quite neatly, ‘Tokyo’ is a pleasantly Beatles-esque surprise. Ditching the keys instead for an acoustic guitar, the track follows a confused and loved-up narrator (familiar) through three minutes of pure, unadulterated amour. And though it may be significantly less complex than other titles on the album (take the opener, ‘Rom-Com Gone Wrong’), it shows a real range from our own English Romeo. Naturally, it’s immediately followed by a slow, sultry tale of unrequited love, deliciously reminiscent of his early years. Classic.

But while romantic undertones may be found across the Maltese board, that’s by no means to say he hasn’t steadily progressed from his acclaimed debut...

he fireworks came early on Monday evening as Palace returned to Glasgow with a bang. Promoting the release of their latest album, Life After – a beautiful and progressive sophomore – the quartet received a hefty Scottish welcome in the church-turned-music-hub of St Luke’s.

It was, by all accounts, the perfect venue for them: sound echoed through every corner, filling the walls and rumbling through the wooden floorboards; you feel so close you’re practically in the music. With house lager at just £4 a pint (can I get a yee-haw), the crowd was as alive as it could be for a band singing about dying.

As for the performance itself, any hesitations I had swiftly dissolved. For a group whose sound isn’t necessarily what you’d call ‘upbeat’, I was prepared for a couple hours spent in the presence of four guys gently swaying behind their instruments. Not so. Emotive, tender and powerful, Palace did exactly what a band should do at a gig: they breathed life into their records. The source of most surprise (pleasant though it was) came undoubtedly from frontman Leo Wyndham – the dude sang like he might never sing again. Blasting out lyrics over an impressive range, delivering them with more heart and soul than we could have hoped for, it was truly difficult to unglue your eyes from him...