The Vaccines
Back In Love City
The fifth full length album from the awesome, anthemic indie-rockers The Vaccines, following on from 2018's Combat Sports.
Back In Love City, is the new album produced by Daniel Ledinsky (Rihanna, Carly Rae Jepson), Andrew Maury (Lizzo, PostMalone) and Fryars (Pharrell Williams, Mark Ronson).
It sees The Vaccines both perfecting their winning formula, and pushing their sound forward, evolving from their previous foundations with an album that reflects on escapism as a necessary part of modern living.
With 4 Top 5 UK Albums, including a #1 with 2012’s Come Of Age, and 19 singles playlisted on BBC Radio One, The Vaccines' fifth album creates a place where people go to find solace, satisfaction, safety, and connection: Love City.
Super Easy Records / AWAL
CD | LP
Signed
The Wombats
Fix Yourself, The The World
Indies exclusive LP is on 'blue' coloured vinyl.
Standard LP is on 'eco-mix' coloured vinyl.
The fifth full length album from the incredible indie-poppers The Wombats, following on from 2018's Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life.
Recording remotely over the past year from their respective homes, the band have been working hard to produce some of the most captivating, inventive and forward-thinking music of their career to date. With frontman Matthew “Murph” Murphy in Los Angeles, bassist Tord Overland Knudsen in Oslo and drummer Dan Haggis in London, they discussed each day’s plan via Zoom, then recorded separately, sending individual files to producers Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers), Gabe Simon (Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey), Paul Meaney (Twenty One Pilots, Nothing But Thieves), Mark Crew (Bastille, Rag‘n’Bone Man) and Mike Crossey (The 1975, The War on Drugs, Yungblud) to mix into the finished tracks. “It was pure madness, to be honest,” explains Murph.
“We’re so excited for people to hear this new album! We’ve explored new genres and pushed ourselves further than ever musically. It will always stand out for us in our memories from our other albums as we recorded it across three cities during lockdown, and we weren’t all in the same room at the same time!” says Dan Haggis.
The Wombats Records / AWAL
CD | LP
Pre-Order
Viagra Boys
Welfare Jazz
Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world.
There's a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David Yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave's haunted bark. Add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl. For every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit's catalog, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society's normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
Viagra Boys' Sebastian Murphy dreams about everyone hating his guts. A lot. "I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me," he recalls, almost reverently.
The band's new album, Welfare Jazz, doesn't bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute. There's plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you're not always going to be nice, you're not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. So why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.
YEAR001 / AWAL
CD | LP
Everything Everything
RE-ANIMATOR
LP is packaged in a gatefold sleeve with a 12 page booklet.
The fifth full length album from the ever-excellent Everything Everything, following on from one of our favourite albums of 2017 A Fever Dream. They play a super-exciting mix of indie-electro like no other, with supercharged melodies and harmonies in front of a wall of intricate, synth-fuelled indie-rock.
The band’s approach to ‘Re-Animator’ was to streamline the creative process by focusing on harmonies and melodies over synths and programming. Inspiration came thick and fast: wonderment at the wider world despite the horror of its politics; existentialism and the prolonged, if fading, youthfulness of being in a touring band; and the ominous threat of climate change. All things which contribute to a sense of one door closing while another awaits.
Extensive reading shaped such ideas further, especially regarding frontman Jonathan Higgs’ fascination with the eminent psychologist Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind.
It argues that early in human evolution, the two sides of the brain were next to each other but functioned independently. In essence one side would hear the other sending instructions via a disembodied voice -a zombie-like state of pre-consciousness.
“This idea of the divided self captivated me,” said Higgs.
“Jaynes attributes this to the origin of gods, people ascribing deity status to this voice they could hear in their head. All this blew my mind, and I started thinking of ways I could make this a central concept. It really touched me. So across the whole record there are millions or references to this theory – to having a split brain, two selves, hearing voices.”
Fittingly, the album also emerged in two stages. A year of writing and demoing was followed by two weeks recording at RAK last December with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne).
He complemented the band’s back-to-basics nature by encouraging them to record quickly and decisively. It’s a looser, less cluttered sound that heightens their focus on the fundamentals of songwriting.
AWAL
CD | LP
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