“It’s always the goal to challenge myself and the band as much as possible. I want the music to even catch me on the wrong foot from time to time”, admits the singer and musical architect who records ethereal, oft- hushed but forever gripping synth-anchored music under the moniker Klangstof.

The Dutch-born, Norway-raised Van De Wardt is on the surface a happy-go-lucky 24- year-old (“People expect a very depressed young man and instead they get this smiling asshole”), and yet when he retreats to his solitary place to write music, much in the way he’s done since first picking up the guitar at age 14, the anxiety, the negativity, the feeling that he’s misunderstood, it all comes pouring out. The result is a collage of the supremely genteel yet haunting vocals, sleek melodies and experimental beats and rhythms.

There’s a patience at play in Klangstof’s aural creations: the musician is a craftsman when constructing the chilling sound that comprises his stunning debut album, Close Eyes to Exit. It’s there in the crisp, slow-building single “Hostage,” electric guitars gently strummed, electronic beats like a rising heartbeat, all giving way to full- throated release: “I ran for shelter/But I got there,” he intones. Or in the way “Sleaze” shifts from whispered confession (“Nintendo is the only thing that makes me smile”) to propulsive, rainbow-hued synths at a moment’s notice.

After moving with his family from his native Netherlands to rural Norway at age 14, the once-social teenager found himself totally isolated. “I was just a guy playing football and hanging with friends in Holland and then all of a sudden I was sitting in Norway with no one around,” he recalls. “My life was torn apart and I had to start all over again. I had to learn a new language and build up a new life”. He turned to music.

In short time, creating music became an almost manic pursuit for the fledging musician. He’d lock himself in his parent’s basement, master one instrument after the next, tinker on his laptop for hours at a time, searching for the perfect sound. Even after attending Hedmark University College and playing bass in a popular Dutch band, Moss, Van De Wardt felt compelled to return to his own well. “That’s when I started to do Klangstof” (“klang” means echo in Norwegian and “stof”, dust in Dutch).

· BEATS 1 ZANE LOWE
“ If you love Radiohead, Pink Floyd, My Morning Jacket, Mercury Rev and all of the amazing musicians which take songs into a more widescreen environment, and you get to know Klangstof. It’s called ‘We Are Your Receiver.’"

· NME MATT WILKINSON
 “'Hostage’ by Klangstof sounds like the more shimmering moments of pre-bloopy Radiohead, if they had aligned themselves with the production tendencies of Abel Tesfaye and the soaring beauty of all those Sigor Ros moments that make nature programmes so atmospheric."

· IDOLATOR MIKE WASS 
"the soundscape is impressively vast, the lyrics (as sparse as they are) and tone are decidedly intimate."

Petrol Girls are named after Pétroleuses, mythical women of the Paris commune who allegedly set fire to private property with Molotov cocktails made from milk bottles, and rejected traditional gender roles. The inspiration came from a talk on Women and Protest given by writer Laurie Penny, who loosely translated Pétroleuses to Petrol Girls.

The band first formed in 2013 for a house show that singer Ren was putting on to celebrate International Women’s Day. This feminist context was essential for the band’s formation within a wider music community that at the time did very little to encourage women’s participation.

Petrol Girls release their new album ‘Cut & Stitch’ on May 24th 2019.

Annabel has performed a number of prestigious slots in the last twelve months, most notably supporting the iconic Beth Ditto across her UK/EU tour at the back end of 2017, as well as sharing the stage with Nadine Shah, Blaenavon and more. Sets at The Great Escape, Live at Leeds and SXSW last year brought her to wider international attention, whilst fiery performances at Boardmasters, Siren Festival, Neverworld and Reading Festival this summer showcased her intent even further, and having just completed her debut UK headline tour, the future looks extremely bright for Allum.

Recording and layering everything himself, he decided on the live front he needed a band. He recruited friends Daf, Dylan and Sam to form the four headed instrument swapping psychedlic dance rock outfit known as Boy Azooga.

Their songs are packed with a love of all kinds of music from The Beach Boys, Sly and The Family Stone, Caribou, Black Sabbath, William Onyeabor, King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard, Beastie Boys, Can, Outkast, Van McCoy, Ty Segal and so much much more.

They hope to see you at a gig soon and will have a maraca for you to shake.”

Standing on the stage of the Manchester Arena, playing to 20,000 of your hometown’s loudest music fans, is all very well when you’ve had a major label ploughing in cash and pulling the strings to get you there. It’s quite another thing when you’ve got there entirely on your own, self-releasing your albums and building a following by jumping in a van and playing to as many people as will listen for ten years. When you do it The Slow Readers Club way.

“It was a baptism of fire for us,” singer Aaron Starkie says of the band’s string of UK Academy and arena shows. “It taught us our craft on the bigger stages. I’d always been conscious seeing some bands play like they’re selling out Wembley, playing smaller venues. It felt a bit artificial to me. We were just going, in our heads, “one day I’m going to have to do this on the big stage”. We know what we’re doing on those bigger stages now.”

Okay so The Slow Readers Club – the fastest rising anthemic electro noir rockers in the UK – played those arenas when supporting James, but through blinding talent and hard graft they’re well on the way to headline status. That became more evident than ever as their last record The Joy of The Return made its way into the UK album chart’s top ten despite the lack of touring due to a certain global pandemic. And whilst the rest of the country were coordinating Zoom quizzes and baking banana bread, The Slow Readers Club were working on their remarkable fifth studio album 91 Days in Isolation, set for release on October 23rd 2020. Aaron says “This collection of songs was written remotely during the UK Covid-19 lockdown. With each band member sharing ideas over the internet, the songs were pieced together at home and recorded once lockdown lifted”.

It’s clear from one look at their social media that The Slow Readers Club place their fans at the heart of everything they do and that has been no different during quarantine, when they hosted ‘watch together’ sessions of previous shows, remotely recorded videos of fan-selected covers and an unforgettable acoustic session surrounded by 21,000 vacant seats in a hauntingly desolate Manchester Arena, invited for their well-awaited second performance to fly the flag for the city at the venue’s 25th anniversary celebration.

Louder than War once said “The Slow Reader’s Club are simply too glorious to be kept a secret” and with the release of 91 Days in Isolation on the horizon, hot on the heals of Spring’s The Joy Of The Return there’s certainly no danger of that.

From Manchester Arena, to the four corners of the world, The Slow Readers Club are becoming a real page turner.

Whilst supporting Rita Ora on her UK & European tour dates, Marni also released her debut EP ‘Love Just Ain’t Enough’; the title track of which had BBC 1 XTRA A-List support and was the best performing VEVO dscvr session of the series with over 1.3m views.

With two ITV Love Island syncs, Kara peaked at #34 on the Shazam charts and #124 in the iTunes download charts, with her hit track ‘Golden’ also landing a feature in the Netflix hit series ‘Black Lightning’.

After two show-stopping, sold-out headline shows, and a string of Summer festival appearances the 21-year old will conclude the year with a brand new music and an end credit feature on the upcoming Mowgli film which features Benedict Cumberbatch, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett.

Sixty million YouTube views, a modelling contract with Viva Paris, a clutch of awards and high-profile sets at major festivals and a Robbie Williams support slot later, Kovacs’ dark, raw, bare-hearted soul with distinct touches of the greats (Holliday, Simone, Bassey, Winehouse, Portishead’s Beth Gibbons) is on the verge of making her a sultry superstar. Her second album ‘Cheap Smell’ is one of the most open, honest and inspired future soul albums of the decade, named after her last pre-fame band and – like her debut – out to find the positive in life’s toughest turns. Pulling no punches in tackling the light and shade of modern relationships, it’s a series of confessionals about wild love and abusive romantic webs, about hedonism and addiction, that follows Sharon’s rough emotional rollercoaster over the past few years - losing musical and romantic partners and building a new Kovacs family from scratch around producer Liam Howe. “The whole album is this journey of me finding that actually I need to learn to be happy with myself,” she confesses, “and accepting some parts of myself that maybe aren’t perfect.”

From the wry, jaunty wordplay of ‘Adickted’, about losing an ex to cocaine, to theatrical soul dissections of the draw of abusive

relationships (‘Play Me’, first single ‘Black Spider’) and a heart-rending song about meeting the father she never knew as a child (‘Mama & Papa’), ‘Cheap Smell’ is as dark as it is delicious, but with a twinkle in its eye. ‘Midnight Medicine’ is a straight-up celebration of sex and ‘It’s The Weekend’ an ode to getting righteously, blissfully stoned. Set to slot into the grand canon of legendary modern soul confessionals alongside ‘Back To Black’, ‘Cheap Smell’ is a healing album, a glorious trawl through Kovacs’ emotional rubble in order to finally rebuild. “From here, I’m in quite a good place,” she says, “the people I love now are around me. The album really helped me achieve being more happy. I learned a lot about myself and musically. I’m much more confident with the things I make now than I was before.”