Grian Chatten (frontman/songwriter) who spent time among the faded grandeur
of Venice, Vienna and Sicily in search of lyrical inspiration: “I think Romance was maybe
60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling.
This one feels more like 60 per cent corrupted — the mask is wearing the face a little
more. I felt it would be more powerful to leave the hope out and reflect the ugliness
honestly. This one needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning.”
NME says: “A doom-ridden escape from the band of the decade. The gothy tones of
The Cure linger and ‘Dopamine Chamber’ would sit comfortably alongside the melancholy moodpieces of ‘Disintegration’ and ‘Pornography’, as well as the future-proof genre-clash
and dislocation of Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’.”
TUTV: Their first 2 LPs were afire ones, the ones young gunslingers make, full of vim
and vigour and stuffed with muscular barnstormers. With their third album Skinty Fia
the growing-up Irishmen showed signs of change of course, sonically and lyrically.
The 4th full-lengthRomance confirmed their new direction completely
and now with Dopamine Chamber they created/crafted a masterpiece.
A strings sweeping, orchestral, gloom/doom triumph. More cinematic, designed synth arrangements, less youthful guitar upheaval, more in-depth reflections about what worried Chatten sees and hears around him in this dark era.
His ruminative tonality and affecting storytelling timbre are on his most entrancing button. This sign of the times exploit will spin on my headphones for a long time. One
of the most fulfilling accomplishments of 2026.
BJÖRK and ROSALIA have teamed up for a song, of which all proceeds – official version comes later this month – will help to pay the legal fees of people in Seyðisfjörður who are protesting against the new fish farm in their area.
For now you can only listen to the song on YouTube.
It has no title (yet). It’s announced as “help fight fish farming in iceland.”
Björk shared this statement along with the song.
I am offering a song me and Rosalia sang together
the profits will to help the fight against fish farming in Iceland,
people at the fjord seyðisfjörður have stood up and protested
against fish farming starting there
we would like to donate sales of the song to help with their legal fees
and hopefully it can be an exemplary case for others, Iceland has the
biggest untouched nature in Europe and still today it has it´s sheep
roaming free in the mountains in the summers.
It´s fish has swum free in our lakes , rivers and fjords
so when icelandic and norwegian business men started buying fish
farms in the majority of our fjords, it was a big shock and rose up
as the main topic this summer, we don´t understand how they had been
able to do this for a decade with almost no regulations stopping them.
This has already had devastating effect on wildlife and the farmed fish are
suffering in horrid health conditions and since a lot of them have escaped,
they have started changing the DNA in the icelandic salmon to the worse
and could eventually lead to its extinction.
There is still a chance to safe the last wild salmon of the north
our group would like to dare these business men to retract their farms
we would also like to help invent and set strict regulations into Iceland´s
legal system to guard nature.
The majority of the nation already agrees with us
so this protest is about putting the will of the people
into our rule-systems.
20 years ago STEREOGUM was born. The American music website was named after
a lyric from the song Radio #1 by the French electronic duo Air. They call themselves
the ‘best music blog in the world’ and I (almost) agree. Now straight to their best albums
of 2022 selection.
Stereogum:“MOTOMAMI sounds like nothing else from this present moment, but it also sounds distinctly like the present: rapidly scrolling through bite-sized earworms, embodying masculine aggression simultaneously and without contradiction to high femininity, and repurposing old traditions from the last 50 years to envision the future.”
TUTV: For 24-hour flamenco party people.
A mix of hot stuff and chill-out moments.
Single: Saoko
Stream on MOTOMAMI on SPOTIFY
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Stereogum: “She’s one of one. She’s number one. She’s the only one. Beyoncé Knowles
has done a lot of amazing things in a pop career that’s stretched back a quarter-century,
but she’s never attempted anything quite like this.”
TUTV: Back to the 80s with Donna Summer tunes.
Single:Break My Soul
Stream RENAISSANCE on SPOTIFY
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4. ‘Sometimes, Forever’ by SOCCER MOMMY (Nashville, TN)
Stereogum: “She’s still making the same achingly vulnerable, heartrendingly pretty pop-rock we’ve come to expect from Soccer Mommy, but with weird, inspired twists around every corner.”
TUTV: A bit too smooth for my liking.
Single:Shotgun
Stream SOMETIMES, FOREVER on SPOTIFY
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Stereogum: “There may not be a rapper on Earth who captures — or even attempts to capture — feelings of stasis so successfully as billy woods. Aethiopes, his first of two albums this year, is not only an extraordinary meditation on cannibalism and colonialism but a futureless, borderless, mapless breadth of stillness.”
No singles released.
Stream AETHIOPLES on SPOTIFY
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6. ‘God Save The Animals’ by ALEX G (Philadelphia, PA)
Stereogum: “The entire LP is layered with magical moments.
Every second breathes life, especially the twangy, hopeful closer,
“Forgive,” a perfect conclusion.”
TUTV: Unknown to my aural radar.
Single: Blessing
Stream SAVE THE ANIMALS on SPOTIFY
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7. ‘Expert In A Dying Field‘ by THE BETHS (New Zealand)
Stereogum: “Across ‘Expert In A Dying Field’, which wraps existential angst in wry lyricism and fuzzy guitar-pop hooks, the New Zealand quartet unpacks the inherent unfairness in simply being alive in 2022, when — whether due to a pandemic, technology, or the ever-worsening economy — it can feel like the goal posts are constantly moving, but you’re not.”
TUTV: Amplified and jangly dream pop vitality.
Stream EXPERT IN A DYING FIELD b on SPOTIFY
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8. ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ by BIG THIEF (Brooklyn, NY)
Stereogum:“This is the release where Big Thief went big: a 20-track double album recorded across four studios in four different states. Big Thief’s philosophy is simple and down-to-earth; you find the answers when you’re chopping onions, stirring tea, driving at night.”
TUTV:
Single: Change – magical!
Stream DRAGON NEW WARM MOUNTAIN / I BELIEVE IN YOU on SPOTIFY
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9. ‘Diaspora Problems’ by SOUL GLO (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Stereogum: “Over the course of a dozen electrifying tracks clocking in at just under
40 minutes, Philadelphia’s Soul Glo capture the experience of being Black in America.
This is the kind of rage and resistance hardcore was meant for.”
Stereogum: “The Weeknd has flirted with mortality across his catalog of noir-pop, but he really commits to the bit on his immaculately stylized fifth studio album. The notoriously hedonistic singer looks back on a presumed life of regrets alongside famous friends — from Quincy Jones recounting the lasting effects of childhood trauma to Tyler, The Creator promoting prenups.”
Influential and highly-praised American website Stereogum celebrates its 20th birthday this year. A lot of festive stuff the world’s best music blog as they claim themselves waits in the pipeline.
But first their multi-musical-genre list of the 50 best albums of 2022 so far.
Chris DeVille (Editor): “Perhaps as a result of artists sitting on new music during the pandemic’s early phases and dumping it all on us at the same time, it was unusually difficult
to pare down the list to just 50 albums this time around. Both in terms of widely acclaimed consensus favorites and personally beloved sleeper picks, there have just been so many albums to love. At the moment, the following are the ones the Stereogum staff loves the most… any album scheduled to be released by June 30 was eligible for this list, so some of these records are from the future.”
“Lamar is operating like only a few artists in pop history — a superstar at the height
of his powers confounding everyone’s expectations while trying to transcend his own.”
“Other albums of theirs might be more concise, but none is as impactful as this staggering showcase of the mystical energy that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have channeled since
the start of their career.”
“There are underground rap titans all over Aethiopes — El-P, Boldy James, Quelle Chris — but the real meat is in hearing woods and Preservation dig deep into a culture that’s hostile to humanity in general and to Blackness in particular.”
“MOTOMAMI represents a gear switch from arms-length storytelling to something more personal. It goes hardest when Rosalía plays with contradiction: in music, in gender, in
simply being a living human being. Metamorphosis never sounded so exciting.”
1. ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ by BIG THIEF
“After their phenomenal pair of 2019 albums, it was hard to believe Big Thief had anywhere to go but down, both creatively and in terms of the frothing hype surrounding them. And yet here they are with both their most acclaimed and accomplished collection of music yet. Big Thief don’t just prove they’re actually that good. They sound like they can do anything.”
Yo soy muy mía, yo me transformo
Una mariposa, yo me transformo
Makeup de drag queen, yo me transformo
Lluvia de estrеlla’, yo me transformo
Pasá’ de vuelta, yo mе transformo
Como Sex Siren, yo me transformo
Me contradigo, yo me transformo
Soy to’a’ la’ cosa’, yo me transform
