17 December 2024

Band: ILA
Who: Vigorous Belgian rock quartet led by formidable singer-songwriter/guitarist,
with Turkish roots, Ilayda Cicek who’s blessed with a unique voice and shares
unadulterated emotions, sonically and lyrically.

Photo by Turn Up The Volume

Album: AYNA

TUTV: The imperishable cliché is totally accurate here. No fillers, all killers. Heartfelt ardency in motion. 12 heart-and-soul stirring pieces of poignant music that put you in
a feverish trance. Cicek‘s devout voice is the seductive heroine in the middle, surrounded
by a rock-solid band that got better and better over the past couple of years. You can hear/feel her genuine vocal/lyrical passion throughout this highly emotionally striking record.

Prominent artist, high-quality songwriting,
astonishing debut, very bright future.

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ALBUM

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Instagram – Apple Music
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Band: FAT DOG
Who: Five London disco-punk cowboys
who found each other during the awful
2020 lockdown year.

Album: WOOF.

NME said: “Unserious, unhinged and sensational London’s must-see
live band justify the hype with a reckless and raucous debut album
pumped full of adrenaline.”

TUTV: Expect a punk disco drone machine with a, yes, Eastern music-inspired sultriness
on the orgasmic choruses. This turbulent ride will create maddening moshpits around
our messed-up planet with people who desperately want to escape their straight jackets and the exhausting rat race as we know it, at least on the weekends.

They build up their songs, then zigzag their way to a mind-blowing refrain, smack them
down afterward, and start all over again. This barking gang is chaotically awesome,
on record and on a podium.

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Instagram – Apple Music
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Band: SPRINTS
Who: Irish talk-of-the-town
post-punk misfits.

Album: LETTER TO SELF

Pitchfork wrote: “Sprints channel rage into communal uplift Letter to Self
is a bracing, frantic record designed for both thrashing mosh pits and solo
meltdowns, best heard with the volume turned up loud.”

TUTV: ‘Letter To Self’ landed on the first official album release day of 2024
and is still spinning regularly, out loud, on my headphones. These Irish
indies burst with astounding vehemence and sharp-teethed gusto. Their
high-voltage riff-rippers trash and slash along their build-up/break-down
course.

Schizo guitars, unrestrained bass/drum forcefulness, and Karla Chubb‘s
borderline vocality combine for exorcistic flare-ups. Sprints hit the scene
with a big bang on record and on stage. They’re here to stay. Fact!

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Instagram – Bandcamp
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Artist: ELIAS RøNNENFELT
Who: Flamboyant frontman of glamourus
Danish power pop band Iceage.

Album: HEAVY GLORY

Pitchfork said: “The Iceage frontman experiments with a newfound sincerity and
an Americana-inspired sound, searching for beauty in the small and insular.”

TUTV: We already knew from his work with Iceage that Elias Rønnenfelt is a genuine
singer-songwriter-performer and he confirms that status on his debut with engrossing
pop songs, slow and fast, intimate and upbeat.

He’s a romantic at heart and wraps his personal daily-life impressions, desires, demons, going-ons and anything that impacts his existence in through-and-through heart-melting stories and melodramatic melodies.

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Instagram – Spotify
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New album artwork

Artist: KIM DEAL
Who: For those who lived on another planet the past years,
Kim is best known as the utterly cool bass player of indie
icons Pixies and from her own band The Breeders, featuring
her twin sister Kelley.

Album: NOBODY LOVES YOU MORE

MOJO (British music monthly) said: “Nobody Loves You More is a singularly
uplifting, life-affirming listen, where joy and despair, love and loss, are irrevocably
entwined, and kept afloat by Deal’s unfailing lightness of touch.”

TUTV: In the past Deal wrote/shared some of her self-made songs without any real attention from the outside. Now, finally she expresses her mixed emotions about past
and present personal experiences on a full debut LP with several meditative, moony,
and subtly orchestrated reveries. All charming songs for a quiet winter night inside.

Deal‘s slightly hoarse voice is instrumental. Its tender-hearted aura creates a relaxing ambiance, interrupted now and then by more uptempo, upbeat tracks like stand-out
vibe Crystal Breath, the vigorous guitar-frisky Disobediece and the buzzing Big Ben Beat
jam. Forget those past bands, Kim, come back solo. Nobody loves you more than TUTV.

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Instagram – Linktree

Band: RONKER
Who: 4 noizzz junkies
from Belgium.

Album: FEAR IS A FUNNY THING, NOW SMILE LIKE A BABY

Photo © Nathan Dobbelaere

TUTV: No pop tunes, no songs about the bees and the trees. This album is stuffed with manicial mind-fuckers and badass brain-breakers that trash and slash your poor stereo relentlessly and mercilessly. The maddening man in the middle, mental vocalist Jasper, screams and howls, and spits and sneers, with bone-chilling and psychotic horsepower.

Think Kurt Cobain with 4 lungs, fronting a hellish hardcore gang featuring 3 other ruthless punks on an ear-splitting mission. No brakes, no breaks. No rest for the wicked. Ronker is
a barbaric force, their singer is an out-of-this-normal-world performer, their debut is a flabbergasting monster. AARRGGHH!

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Linktree
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Band: BAD RITUAL
Who: Polish trio formed at the beginning of 2020 by three architects.
They play songs immersed in a dark and unsettling atmosphere. Their
music is a blend of indie-folk, swampy blues, and rock ‘n’ roll. It often
evokes associations with David Lynch‘s films, spaghetti westerns, and
film noir.

Album: BAD RITUAL

TUTV: As mentioned in their bio this trio’s music has a shadowy cinematic film noir resonance. They offer songs for the midnight hours, songs for nightclubs where misfits, loners, marginalized characters and dropouts seek some human warmth and a free drink. The tone is melancholic, the timbre is heavyhearted. Think glam legend Chris Isaak, famous crooners The National, and moody Bad Seeds moments. Splendid debut.

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Instagram – Spotify
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Band: VIRGINS
Who: Belfast-based shoegaze band who transcend that reductive
tag to deliver a noise that is thrillingly loud and weightily light.

Album: NOTHING HURT AND ANYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL

📸 @ebony_alexander_media

TUTV: Virgins take you on a flight at supersonic speed way up into the sky above the clouds, where reality becomes surreality, where layers of seventh heaven shoegaze symphonies blast from the space shuttle’s speakers. For 40 phantasy-stimulating minutes, you’ll forget all about what happens down there, on our dramatically disturbed planet.

Layers of glowing guitars, hallucinatory vocals, and an overall lyrical sonority will trigger your fantasies and will make you feel floating high(er) forgetting all about our daily, mind-boggling rat race.

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Linktree – Bandcamp
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Band: ENGLISH TEACHER
Who: Fast up-and-coming inventive
indies from Leeds, UK.

Press photo

Album: THIS COULD BE TEXAS

NME: “The fantastic and the everyday collide on this landmark debut – an adventure in
sound and words. What you have in ‘This Could Be Texas’ is everything you want from a
debut; a truly original effort from start to finish, an adventure in sound and words, and
a landmark statement.

TUTV: English Teacher are special, their debut LP is special. It sounds indie,
but certainly not in a familiar way when it comes to the stunning creativity
and striking architecture of the songs.

Expect a mix of prog-rock dynamics, bits and pieces for a reality musical, wayward euphony and sudden, yet accessible changes of pace and flow, rhythms and moods.

You really need several spins to get into This Could Be Texas but once the mist is gone
you’ll be dazzled by its sheer ingeniousness and the impact of frontwoman Lily Fontaine, vocally and emotionally.

ALBUM

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Instagram – Platforms
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Album cover

Artists: THE GLASS HOURS

WHO: Seasoned American songwriters Brad Armstrong and Megan Barbera.
Their music blurs between Sunday afternoon country folk and the golden age
of the 1970s. Combining influences from Megan’s mountain roots and Brad’s
southern roots, The Glass Hours is currently based in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Debut: THE GLASS HOURS

TUTV: This is the kind of music I love to play at the end of a busy day and after
listening to (too much) noisy stuff. The soothing mix of melancholic country, musing
folk, sepia-colored blues, some bluegrass, roots, and pop/rock influences can work magically to slow down your stressed mind, as it happens here.

The heroes of the sensitive songs here are the duo’s wholehearted voices, solo or harmonizing together. Armstrong and Barbera are both blessed with a characteristically warm, tender and yearning Americana voice.

References? Young and old(er) artists such as Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, Lana Del Rey, Willie Nelson, Crystal Gayle, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Impressive, right? Definitely.

Add romanticized stories about all things good and sad, bright and
dark in life, and you have a sonic companion for relaxing moments.

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Instagram – Website