Music news

• Lil Peep: Everybody’s Everything review – posthumous chills and thrills

  15-11-2019 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Columbia)This variously sad, rocking and indifferent compilation sees the SoundCloud rapper mining a new theme: unrequited love Lil Peep’s death from a drugs overdose in 2017 hasn’t stopped a thriving industry continuing in the emo rapper’s wake. Last year’s Come Over When You’re Sober Pt 2 compiled unreleased material found on his laptop by his mother. And the new documentary Everybody’s Everything traces 21-year-old Gustav Åhr’s progress from So
  
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• Taylor Swift fans given ‘urgent warning’ as £1m lost in ticket scams

  17-04-2024 13:49 via theguardian.com
  
  Lloyds Bank says more than 600 of its customers have been tricked by fraudsters so farA rise in fraud cases involving Taylor Swift fans desperate to buy tickets to her sold-out UK shows has prompted Lloyds Bank to issue an “urgent warning” after more than 600 of its customers were scammed.With the superstar due to arrive in Europe next month, the high street bank said its data suggested that UK fans had lost more than £1m to fraudsters so far. Continue reading...
  
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• Country star Lainey Wilson on her long road to Grammy glory: ‘Maybe I wasn’t as crazy as people thought!’

  17-04-2024 13:30 via theguardian.com
  
  After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never beforeYou get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and an
  
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• John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s sons team up for new single

  17-04-2024 11:19 via theguardian.com
  
  James McCartney’s acoustic ballad Primrose Hill, co-written with Sean Ono Lennon, was drawn from childhood vision in ScotlandThe most famous songwriting credit in history, Lennon-McCartney, has been resurrected – though for a song written by the Beatles’ sons.Primrose Hill, a single by Paul McCartney’s son James, has been co-written with Sean Ono Lennon: an acoustic ballad with a shuffling backbeat and ruminative guitar soloing. Continue reading...
  
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• Tantrums of the rich and famous: nine acts that turned on their audience – from Elton to Bieber to Blur

  16-04-2024 18:08 via theguardian.com
  
  This week, Damon Albarn took umbrage at a Coachella crowd who failed to sing along. But he is far from the worst offenderWhen Coachella 2024 comes to be remembered by future generations, the abiding image will be that of Damon Albarn attempting to engage the crowd in a game of call and response, and then failing, and then having a bit of a go at them.In fairness to Albarn, it was a weird booking. Blur have always fared poorly in the US. Is this the band’s fault for writing all those songs
  
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• ‘Gender and sexuality on a spectrum – I started to unravel all of that’: musician Claire Rousay on dating, depression and Jeff Tweedy

  16-04-2024 10:15 via theguardian.com
  
  Following acclaim for her affecting sound collages, the Texan’s new album flips her old ‘emo ambient’ to ‘ambient emo’, inspired by Young Thug and Sparklehorse – and an unexpected show of charity from the Wilco frontmanFor Claire Rousay, a bed can be a studio, a sanctuary and a suffocating cocoon. On the cover of her exquisitely sad new experimental pop album Sentiment, she is seen huddled under the covers, blankly staring at the camera. On her current tour, s
  
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• Coachella 2024: women save the day as festival suffers an identity crisis

  15-04-2024 20:34 via theguardian.com
  
  Ticket sales might have lagged for the once-unbeatable double weekender but an array of crowd-pleasing female acts made it a worthwhile journeyIt takes a lot of time, money and willpower to make it to Coachella: the desert locale sits three hours from Los Angeles on a good day (five in the case of my drive) and general admission passes for the festival start at $499. Then there’s the cost of lodging, food and booze to consider – no small expense, considering a cup of black coffee at
  
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• ‘It’s really saying you’re not gorgeous at all’: how Babybird made You’re Gorgeous

  15-04-2024 16:13 via theguardian.com
  
  ‘In the 70s and 80s, you’d regularly see images of women in bikinis draped over car bonnets. I wanted to flip that – and see how a male photographer would feel if he had to lie over a car in a thong’We’d released five lo-fi albums that had got us noticed in NME and Sounds, but we were yet to be signed to a record label. You’re Gorgeous was one of around 400 demos I’d recorded on a four-track over five years on the dole in Nottingham. I lived above the Vi
  
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• Doja Cat at Coachella review – an electrifying tour de force

  15-04-2024 14:17 via theguardian.com
  
  Empire Polo Club, Indio, CaliforniaFestival headliner delivered an A-game set, ignoring some of her mainstream hits yet bringing enough energy to power what some have called a middling yearDoja Cat took the Coachella main stage as the last official act to perform on Sunday’s bill, becoming the first female rapper to headline the festival. (She’s also only the second Black woman to do so, after Beyoncé in 2018.) Her closer rounded out a Sunday showcase of powerhouse female perf
  
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• Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life review – down the rabbit hole with a musical maverick

  15-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  He played cello for Allen Ginsberg, nearly joined Talking Heads and was sampled by Kanye West. Now the singular, genre-spanning Russell has the exhaustive study he deservesA secret hero of the dancefloor, the avant garde producer and musician Arthur Russell occupies a strange and silvery slot in the annals of music. He was a low-key cult figure in his lifetime, but one who has been increasingly celebrated. His prodigious output and his refusal to have that work pinned down has, in the decades si
  
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• Akon’s honest playlist: ‘The best song to have sex to? Smack That by Akon’

  15-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The rapper would sing Bob Marley going to school and gets the party started with Black Eyed Peas, but which pop classic is he ashamed to admit liking?The first song I remember hearing
  I don’t know if it’s the first song I remember hearing, but the first song I remember singing was No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley. I grew up in Senegal and I would sing it on my way to and from school.The song I stream the most
  I’m pretty versatile these days but I would probably say Costa Tit
  
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• Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat review – a freewheeling, joyous listen

  14-04-2024 16:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Anti-)
  The American multi-instrumentalist combines a wide range of Black musical traditions on her beautifully crafted fifth solo albumMulti-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla was exploring the Black legacies of country music and Americana long before Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made the idea mainstream. As a member of the group Our Native Daughters, she has highlighted the presence of Black female banjo players, while her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops explored the Black songbook f
  
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• Bodega: Our Brand Could Be Yr Life review – uneven railing against the evils of capitalism

  14-04-2024 14:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Chrysalis)
  The New York indie-rockers retool early work into an eclectic set of musings on porn, Tarkovsky and filthy lucreIndie quintet Bodega’s third album is sort of their first. It reshapes a 33-track lo-fi collection that precursor outfit Bodega Bay dropped in 2015, railing against capitalism’s baleful effect on everything. There’s now a triptych of songs called Cultural Consumer, where once there were five. Ambitiously, Bodega employ shoegaze, Sub Pop indie, post-punk an
  
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• Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace review – an elegant rebirth

  14-04-2024 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Impulse!)
  British jazz star Shabaka Hutchings drops the sax for reeds and flutes on an album exploring fear, courage and the power of breathworkTypical: you wait ages for a flute album from a musician famous for other things, and then two come along almost at once. Hot on the exhale of rapper André 3000’s New Blue Sun, released last November, comes another exploratory redefinition, this time from British sax phenomenon Shabaka Hutchings. André 3000 guests here.Hutchings step
  
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• ‘I spend less time self-sabotaging’: Robbie Williams and Joe Lycett on making art

  14-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The pop star and comedian discuss their artwork, social media and how Williams came of age in a classic Birmingham clubJoe Lycett and Robbie Williams were brought together by Instagram. Last August, Williams posted a painting of a small, saintly looking child (not him), and captioned it with an account of how he had once made the mistake of reading the comments below a Mail Online piece. “It was hellish,” he wrote. “The person (me) they were describing was the most horrendous p
  
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• All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines review – from best man to muckraker

  14-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  In this ‘director’s cut’ of their 1983 book, which Paul McCartney burned, a former Beatles employee and a music writer appear preoccupied with stirring up scandal around the band’s splitThe biannual Journal of Beatles Studies was launched by Liverpool University Press in October 2022. The peer-reviewed publication aims to “inaugurate, innovate, interrogate and challenge narrative, cultural historical and musicological tropes about the Beatles”; as such, it is
  
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• Sunday with Eddy Grant: ‘I’m surrounded by the best cooks in the world’

  14-04-2024 07:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The muscian, 76, on life in Barbados, spending time in the studio and why he has never drunk or smokedSunday funday? I’m quite a boring person on Sundays. I invariably spend most of my time in the studio, else I’m out walking or cycling.Where will you go? I live at Bayley’s Plantation, the most historic plantation in Barbados. I walk for miles through the sugarcane field to the beach, which is sublime.What’s for lunch? Whatever takes my wife’s fancy. Lots of vegetab
  
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• Romy review – a masterclass in bittersweet feeling

  13-04-2024 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Roundhouse, London
  Showcasing her debut solo album, last year’s Mid Air, the xx frontwoman escapes the elegant restraint of her band with a set full of euphoric rhythms and unambiguous hymns to her wifeRomy Madley Croft, sometimes of the band the xx, is somewhere on stage, veiled in a thick fog of dry ice. Amniotic beats throb in the distance. We’re nearing the end of the first night of her two London Club Mid Air sets in which Romy’s celebrated solo debut album of last year, M
  
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• Big Zuu: ‘Music and cooking make me feel euphoric’

  13-04-2024 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The rapper and presenter, 28, on coming from a massive family, avoiding Tinder and why winning a Bafta made him want to cryLiving in temporary housing as a kid gave me character and hunger. We moved all over London: Victoria, Battersea, Swiss Cottage and Kilburn. Growing up that way was very difficult, but I also appreciated the system for giving us a home. It’s a weird feeling.I come from a massive family. My dad is one of five, and Mum has 13 siblings; my grandad was busy. I’m from
  
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• One to watch: English Teacher

  13-04-2024 13:30 via theguardian.com
  
  The Leeds band fuse dreampop, psychedelia and emo-rock with smart, fresh songwriting and tender momentsAre you paying attention at the back? Whenever a music scene erupts – and it rarely does these days – it’s followed by the inevitable slew of copycats. With the breakout British bands of recent years, much of that hype has orbited south London. But English Teacher are reorienting northward, with smart songwriting that feels fresh. The four-piece met at Leeds Conservatoire, pla
  
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• Jess Ribeiro: Summer of Love review – a balm for anxious times

  13-04-2024 02:00 via theguardian.com
  
  With expansive, experimental instrumentation, the Melbourne musician’s fourth album records our contemporary chaos – and finds a glimmer of hopeGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailJess Ribeiro has range. Over the last decade, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has flitted from gentle storytelling to something a little weirder and more experimental. There was the folksy world of her debut, 2012’s My Little River; her following two albums added more texture and reverb, and a
  
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• ‘I want to bring the party up north’: Nia Archives on unleashing a Yorkshire rave revolution

  12-04-2024 12:00 via theguardian.com
  
  She had to go her own way to get her 90s indie-infused drum’n’bass bangers heard. Now, after opening for Beyoncé, the performer is about to release her first album, a ‘quintessentially British record’Nia Archives is a loud and proud junglist. When you dive deep into the West Yorkshire DJ, producer and singer’s discography, you might assume she was around during the genre’s mid-90s golden era. But being born in 1999 hasn’t stopped her from being no
  
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• Post your questions for Sheila E

  12-04-2024 11:52 via theguardian.com
  
  Whether you want to ask the Latin music legend and groundbreaking drummer about learning to play on pots and pans, paradiddles or Prince, now’s your chanceIn such an illustrious career, you might think there are few “firsts” left for Sheila E to conquer. She started performing age five and played with her father’s band. She joined the George Duke Band in 1977, the same year she met Prince, who would become perhaps her greatest collaborator. She’s toured with the lik
  
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• Still House Plants: If I Don’t Make It, I Love U review – inspiringly fearless and free art rock

  12-04-2024 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Bison)
  Powered by Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s astonishing singing, the British trio explore Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detailFrom the album title onwards, unstoppably ardent feeling fills this awe-inspiring album from the British art-rock trio, whose music swells your heart and fizzes your mind. Creeping ever further out of the underground since forming at Glasgow School of Art in 2015, you’d need a whiteboard to triangulate the various acts that come to mind listening to th
  
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• Grégoire Maret/Romain Collin: Ennio review – emotional, ecstatic Morricone homage

  12-04-2024 09:30 via theguardian.com
  
  (ACT)
  Harmonica star Maret and pianist/composer Collin pay homage to Ennio Morricone with drifting church-echo and trancelike soundsOrnette Coleman once told the BBC’s Jazz on 3 that when his mother Rosa gave him his first saxophone, but couldn’t afford lessons, he thought it was a toy and played it without realising “you have to learn something to find out what the toy does”. Maybe it’s an extreme case, but not an unfamiliar jazz story. Collisions of improvisers&rs
  
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• Girl in Red: I’m Doing It Again Baby! review – ambitious alt-pop overshadows candid lyrics

  12-04-2024 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Columbia)
  Fresh from a support slot on Taylor Swift’s Era tour, the Norwegian singer-songwriter pivots from lo-fi indie to full-blown widescreen popGirl in Red often seems fearless. From her raw first single I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend, Marie Ulven has laid everything bare in desperately romantic queer love songs and blunt, honest lyrics about depression. Her full-band live shows are almost reckless: at her 2022 Glastonbury performance, she plunged into the mosh pit, mic still on.Since tha
  
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• ‘They said I was worse than the Sex Pistols!’: folk legend Linda Thompson on trashing dressing rooms and losing her voice

  12-04-2024 06:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s carThe photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut, although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller&rsq
  
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• Deep listening: the haunting sonic world of Cassandra Miller

  11-04-2024 17:21 via theguardian.com
  
  Her intimate compositions take existing melodies that she refracts, rethinks and expands into compelling new pieces. Ahead of the premiere of a new work for guitarist Sean Shibe, Cassandra Miller talks about process, pleasures and sleep chanting“I steal people’s souls”, says Cassandra Miller. The 47-year old Canadian composer sits in her light-filled living room at the top of a London block of flats, looking tranquil and as unlike a master of the dark arts as it is possible to
  
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• Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud review – bold, fresh jungle unbound by tradition

  11-04-2024 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (HIJINXX/Island)
  The Bradford producer confidently tethers her breakbeats to a pounding four-to-the-floor kick drum – which would have been unheard of in the 90s – on a pop-facing, innovative recordJudging by the cameraphone footage, Nia Archives’ support slot at the last of Beyoncé’s 2023 London gigs was not an unqualified success. Archives has suggested she “got a lot of hate for playing jungle” at the show: the audience certainly look like it’s
  
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• ‘The spirits of my ancestors empower me’: jazz great Idris Ackamoor on Afrofuturism, activism and André 3000

  09-04-2024 16:39 via theguardian.com
  
  A musical seeker since childhood, the 73-year-old’s journeys have taken himfrom lessons with Cecil Taylor to a formative tour of Africa and now work with the Outkast star. He explains why he’s still chasing the next chapterThe greatest music by spiritual jazz maestro and acclaimed saxophonist Idris Ackamoor suggests a swirling symbiosis between the living and the dead. Take his 2020 song When Will I See You Again?, in which his unfeigned croak of the words “we’ll all be f
  
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