review
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8/10 Wallis Bird has never sounded particularly interested in perfection, and thank Christ for that. “Hold Tight!” works precisely because it feels alive. Messy in places. Urgent. Warm. Full of movement and breath and friction. In an era where so much contemporary folk-pop arrives vacuum-sealed and emotionally overmanaged, Wallis continues to sound gloriously human. Released…
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7/10 A Must-Watch, Must Listen To, and Must See Live Band! Akrobat’s new single “Dirty Gathering” arrives like a slow leak of tension through concrete. Nothing about it rushes to impress you. Instead, it coils itself gradually around atmosphere, restraint and unease, revealing a band increasingly comfortable in mood, texture and ambiguity rather than obvious…
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9/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. With Blindness, The Murder Capital have delivered the strongest and most fully realised record of their career so far. Not because it is cleaner or more commercially accessible, but because the band finally sound completely unconcerned with fitting neatly inside the increasingly exhausted “post-punk revival” label that…
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8/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. With Open Wide, Inhaler finally sound less concerned with escaping the shadow hanging over them and more focused on becoming the band they were probably always heading towards. For years, lazy discourse around the Dublin four-piece revolved around lineage rather than music. But by the time Open…
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Throwback Review 10/10 *Part of our throwback album review series. Looking back now, The Clearing feels like the album where Wolf Alice stopped trying to prove themselves to anybody. By the time the record arrived in 2025, the band had already survived the strange modern trajectory from indie darlings to Mercury Prize winners to one…
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8/10 There is something quietly cinematic about “Darlin’”, the new release from Irish collective AINM, but not in the overly polished or self-conscious way that term often gets thrown around. Instead, the track feels expansive because it understands atmosphere. It understands restraint. It allows space to exist between the notes. Originally beginning life as a…
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Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear feels perfectly calibrated for this cultural moment. A novel obsessed with nostalgia, memory and reinvention, it interrogates why modern society remains so addicted to romanticising the past. Part literary fiction, part cultural critique, the novel has already generated enormous attention ahead of its forthcoming film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway, who is…
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8/10 Daði Freyr has always occupied a curious space in modern pop. Too eccentric to be conventional chart-pop, too emotionally sincere to be dismissed as novelty, and too musically sharp to fade into the endless algorithmic sludge currently swallowing the genre whole. Like many others, you may have first discovered Daði in 2020 with his…
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Our Rating 8/10 There is a quiet precision to Ailbhe Reddy’s Kiss Big that sets it apart from much of the current indie landscape. It does not compete for attention. It earns it gradually. The record is built on restraint. Arrangements are deliberately minimal, allowing space for both vocal delivery and lyrical detail to carry…
The Industry Review 