“I decided to give myself six weeks to write an album like they used to do back in the day and that became really inspiring” Serge recalls. “It was going to be classic songs, no self-indulgence, nothing was going on there that shouldn’t. I’d heard Berry Gordy had said if you’ve not got them in the first four bars then you’re finished, so I went in with this old school attitude of song-writing.”

Following the more electronic direction on 2014’s ‘48:13’ Kasabian were keen to make a truly great guitar album. “There was an ambition to save guitar music from wherever the hell it’s going. We’re trying to save it from being written off as just old music. We wanted to make a very positive album full of hope with guitars to remind people that it’s still relevant.”

The band originally formed as Saracuse in 1997, but later changed their name – taking their new moniker from Linda Kasabian, a get-away driver for the notorious Charles Manson. Despite first beginning to record material in the late ‘90s, the band didn’t release their eponymous debut album until 2004.

Their second album, ‘Empire’ was a huge success, spawning a further run of hit singles while the album itself debuted at Number One oon the UK Albums Chart.

Its follow-up, ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’, was their bravest and boldest yet but still no less popular: in additions to scoring them a consecutive Number One, it was also nominated for the 2009 Mercury Music Prize.

2012 saw the band release ‘Velociraptor’ which saw another arena tour and headline slots at the Isle of Wight and Reading/Leeds. 2013 saw the band headline Hard Rock Calling in London’s Queen Elizabeth Park.

As the ten year anniversary since the release of their self titled debut approached in 2014, Kasabian went on to headline Glastonbury, play their biggest show to date in front of a sold out crowd of 50,000 Leicester fans and release the critically acclaimed album ‘48:13’.

In 2015, the band headlined V Festival, and 2016 saw the band play two sell out shows at the King Power Stadium in celebration of Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League title success.

Kasabian have four UK No.1 albums to their name and have sold over 5.5 million albums worldwide. They’ve won a Brit, seven NME awards, four Q Awards and have headlined Glastonbury Festival, as well as V Festival, T in the Park, and numerous festivals worldwide.

To put it simply in the parlance of our times, you know when it’s real…

GRAMMY® Award-nominated Norwegian singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer Jarle Bernhoft emphasizes this personal connection on his fourth full-length offering and first as Bernoft & The Fashion Bruises—the aptly titled Humanoid. Recorded as a full band, the record unlocks a soulful spirit buoyed by simmering R&B grooves and powerful pop hooks. In assembling this bold, bright, and brilliant body of work, the artist surveyed the landscape and made a conscious decision to go against the grain.

“So much current music is computerized and machinelike,” he affirms. “I felt like I should go the other way and create human music again. It’s imperative to keep in touch with organic life, so I dove into those soundscapes. I rediscovered that touch. By ample use of guitars, drums, and bass, I’m trying to smash people out of Facebook and back into real life.”

If anybody can do it, it’s him. Since making his solo debut on 2008’s Ceramik City Chronicles, he’s quietly amassed a catalog celebrated by fans and critics alike, spanning full-length offerings Solidarity Breaks [2011] and Islander [2014] as well as EPs Stop/Shutup/Shout It Out [2016] and The Morning Comes [2017]. Highlighted by “Come Around” and “No Us, No Them” [feat. Jill Scott], Islander received a 2015 GRAMMY® nomination in the category of “Best R&B Album.” Along the way, he performed on Ellen and Conan in addition to earning acclaim from NPR, USA Today, and many more.

Joined by The Fashion Bruises, the process for Humanoid commenced in old school fashion. Rather than rush into the studio, they spent time woodshedding in the rehearsal room. The shared chemistry flourished.

“We did this all as a band,” he continues. “We didn’t use computers. We really played through everything. The Fashion Bruises are such an integral part of the sound. The days of playing solo aren’t over, but I’m definitely taking a break. The goal was to keep this like a live performance.”

They recorded at Oslo Klang in Norway for only two weeks with Bernhoft behind the board in the producer’s chair as his infant son crawled around the space.

“There’s nothing better than having a baby crawl around your feet when you’re playing guitar,” he smiles.

The group introduced the album with the first single “Buried Gold” [feat. Raelee Nikole]. Over a funky beat driven by lively guitars, he locks into a hypnotic duet with Raelee. Their voices entwine in an undeniable back-and-forth, speaking to a central theme.

“The song represents what the album is about,” says Bernhoft. “It’s a dialogue between an optimist and a pessimist who are both engaged in fisticuffs daily within me. I’m shifting between disillusionment and re-illusionment, which is the state of things. I remember when the Brexit vote had just come in. Not too long after was the American presidency vote. It’s was if the world was unraveling. I felt torn between wanting to pick up the gloves and fight or just saying, ‘Fuck the world.’ Both of my viewpoints come across. Raelee really shines on it too.”

Elsewhere, handclaps, acoustic energy, and warm reverb bottle a sun-soaked sensibility on the West Coast-inspired “California,” while “Don’t Give Up” offers up a powerful send-off highlighting the expanse of his voice.

In many respects, the title track remains the perfect representation of Humanoid. A hummable guitar riff gives way to a lively chorus that’s downright impossible to shake.

“It says something about the man-and-machine relationship,” he admits. “I’m not sure whether to be optimistic about it or not. You’ll see people at dinner or in a café staring at their screens and not acknowledging each other. I’m thinking of how we interact, talk to each other, and whether or not we’re enhancing our lives or amputating them with these interfaces we use. I’m trying to find people, but I can’t see them behind their screens.”

In the end, Bernhoft has got the power to make people put down their phones, get up, dance, and maybe even think.

“You can dance to this one, but you might have some deeper thoughts,” he leaves off. “All said and done, I’d love to just reintroduce a connection.”

For every sublime, a ridiculous. In the wake of his self-titled debut, James was invited to join a choir including Antony Hegarty, Laurie Anderson and Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt to sing behind Lou Reed at Carnegie Hall for an emotional finale at a Free Tibet benefit, curated by Philip Glass. ‘The reason I still can’t play in mainland China,’ he notes. It was an experience only marred by the toke of a joint handed him from one of the cleverly obnoxious Brooklyn hip-hop trio, Das Racist, before stepping onstage. ‘There I am, my gangly 6’6” self, poking out the back of this ridiculously well-appointed choir and I’m like just feeling so awkward. And paranoid, of course. It was a bit like being in Dad’s Army.’

During the making of The Colour in Anything, James has found himself in other rarefied circles. There have emerged amid the undeniable global musical elite new friends, allies and admirers attracted to his bespoke musical mood, his certainty with sound. His influence has proved legion. There is barely a boy in his bedroom making beats that is not in thrall to some of Blake’s methodology and sound. At the upper musical tier, his music has proven irresistible to the international r&b community who came courting for collaboration.

There was the meeting with Kanye West in Hollywood’s Hidden Hills, for which Blake, not West arrived two hours late (‘they were perhaps a bit too Hidden?’). The LA playback for a new Beyonce record, with the artist’s daughter singing along in approval to a vocal hook of James’ composition (‘Beyonce said “that’s how you know it’s catchy”). There were the hours he poured into sessions for Frank Ocean’s forthcoming opus (‘absolutely the biggest influence on this record’). And the Transatlantic passing back and forth of alchemical music files with his good friend (‘the closest I have to a brother’) Justin Vernon, Bon Iver, which forms The Colour in Anything’s arresting, surprising, rousing, beautifully semi-intelligible centrepiece I Need a Forest Fire (‘even I don’t know what some of the lyrics are’). There were sessions in Rick Rubin’s Zen Malibu retreat, Shangri-La, where James watched with sanguine calm as Rubin spliced together his hours of improvisation, lying on the floor, scratching his beard.

‘It’s gone by in such a flurry that I didn’t sometimes stop to appreciate what was happening to me,’ James says now, looking back on the surreal moments that have punctuated his brilliant musical life. ‘I’ve been around some of the most unbelievable writers and musicians, choreographers and composers. Only now do I feel like I’ve had some of the blindfold taken off me where I can see what actually happened.’ James is a prodigious, gifted musician whose area of speciality – that flirtation point at which club music goes in for the clinch with Classical – has yet to be bound by genre.

The night at The Prince of Wales brought James back down to earth from his wandering musical star. ‘Big sound system in an old room? Boom. It was great.’ They proved cathartic on two counts. Firstly, he was getting toward the disquieting closing stages of finishing a record. It had a title, The Colour in Anything.

The construction of the record, mostly conjured in his South London bedroom studio, was clouded by early ravaging waves of self-doubt. ‘The album is, I guess, about my growth as a person,’ he says. ‘When you come back from a tour, you feel like you no longer have a purpose. There was a period of quite a lot of confusion as to what the fuck my role was. A lot of the stuff I wrote at that point I didn’t use. It wasn’t like happy mistakes. It was more that I really didn’t know what people want. Or I don’t know what I want.’ The Mercury Music Prize for Overgrown which sits on his mantelpiece was a temporary cause for celebration, but sounds like it further exacerbated some initial third album neurosis. ‘I knew there was expectation.’

Then there was the central issue of James himself. Someone told James that the problem with being in the public eye is that you become frozen in time at the moment you step into it. This triggered a further quiet crisis of confidence. Had the touring, the recording, the being at the centre of a creative and commercial process just been about arrested development, after all? The title track alludes directly to this. It is about approaching becoming a man, accepting responsibilities. ‘All I wanted to do was carry you for aching,’ he sings, ‘all I wanted was to mend things that were breaking.’ This is his most personal missive yet, as close to the piano man tradition as he has veered. ‘I struggle to find the colour in anything’ is a heartbreakingly transparent evocation of the blackness of male failure.

The silver lining at the end of a period of rabid self-assessment was the most redemptive of them all: love. ‘I met somebody in the last two years really who completely turned my attitude and general outlook around and essentially made me grow up very fast in a way I hadn’t been made to before.’

James was brought up an only child in Enfield, North London. ‘It’s a solar system in which you are the sun.’ He says he has been useless in relationships before. ‘Very selfish. And allowed to be selfish.’ A new girlfriend began to challenge him to look harder and deeper at his life, to pull him up on failings, to correct himself. ‘In order to keep the person you want to be with, there were a lot of things about me I had to change. I met somebody who I very much appreciate for walking in at that point. Because my life was in a very untended state.’

As the album began to take shape, James Blake found himself asking hard questions of himself, in the company of someone who allowed him to do it. A record of self-reflection, that bridged his interior and exterior lives, about the communication difficulties shared between two people, sorting yourself out, learning to love and about simply growing up took arresting musical shape. The recurrent themes of miscommunication are set out transparently on the poignant album opener, Radio Silence, then further developed on the unlikely jolt of Put That Away and Talk To Me, I Hope My Life and Noise Above Our Heads.

The second byproduct of the Brixton night with 1-800 Dinosaur was more generational, tying to an emerging strain of maleness James directly connects to. A sweating night in a little pub, with banging music across the dysmorphic spectrum of a dance music gradation system in eclectic 21st century free-fall, confirmed to James something he has suspected for a long time among musicians of his ilk. That those experimenting at the outer edges of sound, on that magical hinterland between electronic experimentation and classical composition, have a subdued, sometimes melancholy overtone to their music on account of having missed the joyous mysteries of acid house.

‘As much as that sounds like a joke, I think it’s true,’ he says. ‘I’m gutted I missed hardcore and raves in Epping Forest or around the M25. Travelling sound-system parties? I missed all of it. We missed the drugs as well. My generation got the wrong ones.’ Accounting for some of the minor key discordancy and sub-bass experimentation at the challenging end of his work, James Blake’s music can feel occasionally like the most wilful distillation of the generation that missed out on the last proper offline teenage rampage. His music is full of shadows because he was born into the half-light, coming of age when the lights went on at the party. James’ generation were left to placate the woeful worries of turning boy-to-man without the comfort blanket of a brand new shape for bacchanalia. ‘We were 20 years too late,’ he says. ‘And,’ he laughs, ‘I still don’t really know what becoming a man is.’

Because James Blake is an artist whose music doesn’t depend on the ardour of youth, because it can be sedate in its beauty and rage, with each record his craft acquires a new vintage. The Colour in Anything might yet be considered his masterpiece. The influences are strange and new. Alternate listens suggest David Sylvian, Chet Baker, Laurie Anderson, Jeff Mills or Arvo Part. There are still genetic traces of the key records that marked his initial predisposition to make music – D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and Antony and The Johnson’s I Am A Bird Now – but they’re now so entrenched in his DNA to sound almost invisible. ‘Just growing up is almost synonymous with self-improvement. So I think that’s what this album is about: maturing and shedding a slightly childish skin and trying to become happier in the process.’

There are tangible signs that James Blake is growing into an artist with tenacity, fresh perspectives and endurance, perhaps in the mould of a post-club Peter Gabriel brushing the detritus from the dancefloor as the lights go up. When James started making records, they were full of distorting effects on his true voice. There was a sense that he may be hiding not out of purely experimental motives but also a sense of young, mannish embarrassment. ‘Absolutely.’ At 27, he is at that fascinating precipice where adulthood itself becomes a matter of fight or flight. ‘I was incredibly self-conscious about how my voice came across to other people. I was incredibly self-conscious, full stop.’ Amid all the lessons that love and learning have taught him, the art of letting go was the least expected. ‘It was convenient that I wanted to experiment because it helped me to hide away. I spent a long time in the wilderness. I’m out of it now.’

With the help of Rubin, Ocean and Vernon, even perhaps through the countless requests that came through to collaborate, James has found himself by learning to let go. The transparency of songs like My Willing Heart and Modern Soul would not, could not have happened before. “With Justin, I wasn’t that interested in making music with him, initially,” he says, “I just wanted to be his mate.” The recording happened anyway. With Rubin, it was about allowing a second pair of ears in at the crucial development stages of building a new world on record. “The first time I was at Shangri-La, one of my band came to visit. I came out in a white t-shirt and slack trousers, no shoes and socks and I looked like I actually was at rehab or I’d joined a cult. Oh, James has changed.” It was true. He had. With Frank, it was about building a mutual support system. “I love Frank. He’s magnetic. The myopic viewpoint of my music and maybe my life slightly got in the way for a second. Then I caught myself. I stopped being an only child on this record.”

For James Blake, the transparency of light now beckons. It may yet be the colour in everything.

The duo met while pursuing music business degrees at Middle Tennessee State, a large public university just outside of Nashville. Prior to meeting up at a dorm party, the two were figuring out how to become their own local legends.

Huber was fronting a psychedelic folk-rock band, whereas Kelley was something of a mainstay in the Nashville hip-hop scene. Well, sort of. “I was making beats for this hip-hop duo and we got to open for GZA, but I didn’t know how to DJ my own stuff.” After meeting Huber, “I just asked ‘can you turn my beats into a live show?’” Soon thereafter, Kelley sent Huber his self-composed Man of the Hour EP and the two realized the potential in their partnership. Cherub began in earnest, with Huber’s live production embellishing Kelley’s clever songcraft.

Above all else, Cherub are men of the people, dudes of the dancefloor, aficionados of the after hours. From the countless house parties they’ve played in Tennessee to their Age of Reason tour with Gramatik to their prestigious Red Rocks Amphitheater gig with STS9, they’ve always made it a point to engage with their fans. “People always think it’s weird when we ask during the show if there’s an after party,” Kelley says with a laugh. Antipasto starts the party, what happens from there on out is anyone’s guess.

Produced by Charlie Hugall (Florence and The Machine, Ed Sheeran), Paul Savage (Mogwai, Franz Ferdinand) and Peter Miles (We Are The Ocean, Futures, The King Blues) and with arrangements and strings from Valgeir Sigurðsson (Sigur Rós, Björk), the resulting 10-track album is bold, expansive, confident and cohesive - an undeniable step up in both diversity and volume from their critically acclaimed debut, Shallow Bed (March 2012).

Dry the River have announced a UK headline tour in October. The dates follow a number of festival shows over the summer, including appearances at Glastonbury and the Main Stage at Reading and Leeds.

They ended their last run of UK dates with a euphoric sold-out show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in November 2012, a year which began with them appearing in the BBC ‘Sound of 2012’ poll. This tour will see them play their biggest headline show yet, at The Forum in Kentish Town, London.

Their debut album is an immersive experience intended to be absorbed and cherished with repeated listens, not to be heard once on laptop speakers and disregarded. Much like a great novel, this one is hard to put down and will stay with you forever.

The London five-piece are a product of the modern world and its easy access to music. Bonding over a mixture of the best in electronica and guitar-based music, they’ve fused this eclecticism into a truly inimitable sound of their own. “You could pick some songs and we’d be likened to a folk act, another few and we’d be called dubstep,” explains front man Tim Digby-Bell. How many bands can you say that about? Their cerebral experimentation may not be mainstream, but it’s fast becoming a favourite among the cognoscenti.

The journey began with two original members – Tim Digby-Bell and Toby Leeming (vocals/live programming and beats) – producing on a computer whilst at Edinburgh University. Both realised what they were creating was too big for just a couple of people to play. Seb Dilleyston was brought in to add emotive atmospheres on violin having previously trained with world renowned violinist Maria Eitler. Toby Lee was next on guitar, and then bassist Ross Stone completed the line-up.

Early gigs in their nascent career were explosive in more ways than one. Aside from gaining a scintillating live reputation they were also becoming known for having things blow up onstage. A show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush saw the lights shatter above their heads as soon as the set began, and at The Barfly in Camden Town there was an electrical fire halfway through their performance. Whether or not the crowd thought these mishaps were all part of a unique live show will remain a mystery but one thing is for certain, their status on the road grew exponentially and support slots for everyone from Matthew Dear to Clock Opera have followed.

What makes the band so compelling is that they are just that, a band. Refusing to rely too heavily on programmed elements, each layer comes to life in the live arena. “We wanted to have moments where we can strip it down to the bare essentials, really intimate moments, and then to build up to these epic electronic parts too. It needs to feel like a real journey,” says Tim.

The debut album is the culmination of a year’s preparation honing and self editing their eclectic sound and huge catalog of demos in preparation to record. Having already self-produced and released two EP’s showcasing their ability to encompass a wide range of sounds and references the final piece of the puzzle came with the introduction of producer Jim Abbiss (Adele, Arctic Monkeys, Ladytron). In March 2012 the band and Jim holed up in a Chatham studio and began work – with many of the parts already formed and recorded, Jim took on a co-production role, intuitively helping them further enhance their sonic make-up.

Digital synths were replaced by richer analogue gear, real strings replaced programmed ones, and even the inclusion of a church organ. “The church was really chilled. I slightly lied. I said we’d dropped ?15 in the collection box,” laughs Toby. Nonetheless they’ve been blessed with a great collection of songs from the process.

‘Push It’ is the lynchpin. A four-four dance beat gives structure to a hauntingly atmospheric six minute epic of lyrical self-doubt. Soaring strings and guitar melodies combine in the pinnacle which sees the guys playing to the limit, giving their all in a song replete with daedal rhythms. ‘Escape Artist’ shows they’re equally adept at the other end of the scale. At their most stripped back, this one is rooted in simple harmonies combining live vocals and looped brass samples, yet carries as much emotive weight as the more layered moments. ‘Gift Horse’ is a beautiful lullaby mixing swooning strings with electronic glitches in a contrasting way that will leave audiences rapt. It’s a debut showing courage, refusing to take one path or another, daring to avoid being pigeon-holed yet cohesive enough to stand firmly as an impressive body of work.

Tim’s powerful voice ties all the diversity together, a rich falsetto, he floats effortlessly amid an ever changing backdrop of beats, synths, and strings, molding his own melodies on a patchwork sound-mosaic already replete with creativity. ‘Constant’ sees his melismatic vocal style delicately accompanied by lilting guitar picking in a real highlight.

Johnny first appeared on the scene in 2006 playing in numerous bands and running club nights, but ears were pricked by his first album A Larum, released in 2008.

A widened palette followed with his sophomore album Been Listening along with global touring. Songs such as Lost and Found and The Water (a duet with old friend Laura Marling) cemented his lyrical reputation, and prompted further collaborations with the likes of Anna Calvi, Barbarossa and subsequent production work with Marika Hackman, showcasing his desire to nurture and collaborate with varied and exciting new talent.

Following the album and a stint writing, producing and performing the soundtrack to indie film A Bag of Hammers, Johnny returned to the boards, appearing in Richard Bean’s The Heretic at the Royal Court, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem alongside Mark Rylance, Richard III and Twelfth Night at The Globe and West End with Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance, before taking the lead in The Low Road by Bruce Norris back at The Royal Court.

Flynn supported the release of his third album, Country Mile, with extensive touring throughout the US and Europe, including a tour in the USA with friends Mumford & Sons, sold out shows across the UK and Europe and a follow up solo tour in the US and Canada, which gave us the Live in Washington DC album. His thespian tendencies have not been neglected either, with a lead in Song One alongside Anne Hathaway released January 2015, and a role in Oliver Assayas' Sils Maria with Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Moretz.

The choice of 'Sillion' as a title for his fourth album was one Flynn reached through a convergence of unlikely forces — of friendship, politics, poetry but it’s a word too that captures much of the album’s colour and mood — its measure of the times.

The word rose up to meet him some time last autumn, post-Brexit, just as America was in the throes of election fever, and the world seemed suddenly upturned. “I had this really visceral, physical sense of needing to go to ground,” Flynn recalls. "And I had a strong sense that the album title had to be earthy and muddy,” Flynn says.

Much of the recording of Sillion was done while Flynn was starring in Martin McDonagh’s play Hangmen. “I was playing a psychopath,” he explains, “so there’s probably some of that darkness in the lyrics, and a celebration that you can explore the baseness of human nature.”

This darkness rises up particularly on the track In the Deepest, which grew out of a film score commission and which Flynn describes as being about “a sense of foreboding … it has such a sense of maleficent drama to it.”

One of the album’s earliest songs is Jefferson’s Torch, when Flynn found himself “trying to write something political.” This was long before Brexit, long before Trump. “But I was reading about lighting the torch for all mankind and about revolution happening every two generations,” he recalls.

For all of Sillion’s political grounding, it is an album of great intimacy too. The opening track, Raising the Dead, tells of Flynn getting to know his new-born daughter.

Heart Sunk allowed Flynn to try out a Voice-o-Graph — the recording booth popular in the 1940s which gave people two flat minutes to make a record. “There’s only two working in the world and there was one in London for a time and I had a chance to have a go in it and that wavy, crackly recording on this song is the recording I made. It sounds like the old Blues records I love. I wanted a sense of time travel in the song, panning from the Voice-o-Graph to the studio recording — at one point there’s one in each ear.”

He found inspiration also, he says, in Jez Butterworth’s play The River. “I’ve always been obsessed with the mysterious experiences you have alone in nature. I grew up by a river and my Dad and I would go poaching”

And the figure of Robert Macfarlane appears once again for Tarp in the Prop. Macfarlane and Flynn had been invited to take part in a series of conversations between writers and musicians at St Andrew’s University.

This is, by some measure, an unusual album. But it is run through with great love and great passion for nature and humour and mankind, for all the silly and base and wonderful things we do. As Flynn put it, describing that same word, Sillion, “it’s about the sacredness of man’s endeavour to connect with the earth while in separation from the earth."

Musically there are few artists who share their understanding, scope and ambition and fewer as prolific and focused. The emotionally direct debut single ‘Only Time Will Tell’, released on Jen Long's Kissability label pronounced the band as the new and exciting London artists of 2013 and immediately cemented them as a must see.

The accompanying video showed them building and ritualistically burning a monumental construction of their now synonymous logo, and showcased the trio's aesthetic ambitions whilst subtly shining a light on their constant need to offer themselves and carve their own path into the musical landscape.

At the core of G L I T C H E S are their regular ‘H A C Y O N N I G H T S’ a series of underground parties accommodated within the heights of G L I T CH E S HQ. Sandwiched between an Algerian Cabal and East End Whores this hub of creativity and vice of the musically and socially inquisitive, provides a through the keyhole insight to how the trio work and live whilst boldly offering up some of London’s most exciting new and established talent, such as We Were Evergreen, Beaty Heart, NZCA/Lines, and We Have Band. It's chaos (within reason).

South London singer songwriter, Jake Isaac released his most recent EP ‘Where We Belong’ on Elton John’s Rocket Records last year, going straight into the Top 10 on the iTunes Singer Songwriter chart. That EP places Jake Isaac firmly alongside the likes of George Ezra and James Bay as an innovative and exciting new talent.

In March this year Jake sold out London’s Bush Hall and headlined shows around the UK and Europe. Jake has spent the summer touring throughout the UK and Europe and is now busy in the studio preparing his debut album due out April 2017 on Virgin Records.

Meeting up to help finish off each other’s songs, sometimes they would become cavernous rhythms and more than often the pair would record just for the hell of it. (On one occasion the two were purported to have stayed up recording the sound of hair swishing across a microphone).

Fusing the elements of disparate musics, the vocal sweetness of Laurel Canyon, Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston and the modern electronic space of the past 40 years, in their first recording ‘Come Save Me’ they created a contemporary psychedelia, with the beauty and simplicity of classic sun-soaked beach pop.

Just weeks after putting it online, it had heavy airplay on Australian radio and a seven inch release on new label The Blue Rider, receiving a positive reaction to the mix of old & new, the uninhibited rhythm and a song rooted in celebrating sadness, its heavenly harmonies jilted by a lyric informing how leaving a loved one can really expose how lonely love really is.

“You can’t trick people in to liking a song” says Gab “We knew we liked it and that we had a really good time making it”.

Understanding that what they had was important and needed to be documented, they decamped to a friend’s studio in France in the summer of 2012 to record their debut album - just the two of them in an empty farm two hours south of Paris, with an 808, a Fender jaguar, a laptop & a pair of vintage Neve console channels.

Their time at La Briche echoes like a strange psychedelic film: cycling in fields of sunflowers, copious amounts of cheese, growing caveman beards and going crazy in the studio. While working they listened to twisted electronica from Liars, Aphex Twin and Autechre. “And when we sat down to dinner we’d listen to Sinatra and Nat King Cole" says Gab.

Meanwhile next door lived a convoy of tradesmen with a thing for hardcore dub…“They were from a scene which is based around homemade soundsystems” says Jono “they take them out in to the middle of nowhere and play literally the hardest most sinister kind of music I’ve ever experienced. It is the weirdest thing in the world”.

The long ways from home helped them to bond and cement their sound and at the same time absorb some of Europe’s cultural and artistic influences from the fierce beats of Berlin’s Berghain to London’s most interesting corners. A mission to re-create a two man wall of sound ensued and with help from friends, locals and a pre-historic desk once used by Conny Plank, the pair set about re-inventing the warmth, harmony and audio sunshine they’d hatched back in Australia.

Their collaborators along the way included long-time friend & Warpaint drummer, Stella Mozgawa and renowned producer/mixer, Ewan Pearson, a friend from Berlin, and they love that the songs have travelled (“they followed us around the world” says Jono) and their balance between old and new, the discovery of something vintage alongside future-looking experiments.

“Finding great music from the past is a way of being adventurous” says Jono " It’s that sense of finding something that you feel belongs to just you”

By the dying days of 2012 their time in France had not been ill-spent and a debut album Howlin was recorded and ready to be mixed.

Their first release from these sessions, The Throw, saw them occupying a space where Screamadelica and its wayward children used to live. A joyful seven minutes weaving melodies & beats with the sole purpose of making people move, of throwing caution to the wind & reaching a higher level with a greater purpose, or maybe without one at all, it touched a nerve & helped soundtrack the last few months.

Next single, ‘The Man I Need’ is more introspective, beats minimal and Gab crying “all you say to me, is all you want to see, you’re not the man I need, that’s what you said to me”. Its ten-minute version climaxes with a voodoo drum-breakdown and the instruction “exercise your chemistry”, and was picked up & played in full by Zane Lowe on BBC R1.

Across the album, Howlin's songs are full of classic hooks but often end in dirty clanking breakdowns. Pop songwriting is buried in layers of crunching synths and pedal effects. “How can you look gloomy? When you look so good to me” wonders Gab in 'Uncertainty', repeating “be my light” over Jono’s techno-inspired beat.

Having played a couple of festivals last summer, adding Jack Freeman on bass, they kicked 2013 off back in Australia on the Big Day Out before playing a packed breathless NME show in London, Gab ending up topless, the audience lost in sound & strobes.

Since then they've toured Europe with Foals, and Australia with the xx and will be back in Europe to play more headline dates and festivals across the summer.

The explosion of colour and sound will echo throughout the year, Jagwar Ma is written on the wind, painted on the stars (as someone else once wrote…)

After the departure of co-founder and vocalist David Jakes earlier this year due to health reasons, Lonely The Brave stood together, supporting their friend but adamant that as one door was closing, they would very soon be opening a new one. They never stopped writing, never stopped creating, and instead started the search for a vocal talent that they could stand side by side with in their march toward album number three.

A short search led them to the door of Jack Bennett, and an instant connection was made as they traded stories, ideas and inspirations. He is noted for his strong and emotionally wrought vocal performances - qualities that have come to define the band’s live show - so it is with some excitement that their first live outing together is announced to take place at Omeara, London, on October 13th. Tickets will be available here - http://smarturl.it/LTB_Omeara - and go on general sale from 9am this Friday, August 17th. This will be a special headline show with no support act and an early 10pm curfew, so be sure to get down early to avoid disappointment.

The band had this to say about Jack’s arrival;

We don’t know where to start with everything that has happened over the last 12 Months or so, so first of all we all want to say thank you to every single one of you that has messaged us with your support during this period. Nothing worth doing is ever easy and your continued words of encouragement really have helped galvanise our belief that this band has so much more to give. It fills us with pride to say that this new chapter of our history will begin in earnest on the 13th October. The show is our way of thanking every single one of you for standing by us and understanding that this is a continuation; that the songs really are the most important part.

With their public-bar rise propelled by word-of-mouth whisperings, 7” releases and an energetic, swirling live show that seethes with energy, Money For Rope released their much-anticipated self-titled full-length recording in November 2012, taking their pulsing sound from dark stages to stereos right across the globe.

Featuring 9 tracks, their self-titled release includes the driving beats of their acclaimed track 'Easy Way Out' as well as the more contemplative feeling 'Misery Lane', the infectious 'Ten Times', a Mack truck-like 'Hang 'em High' and five more to quicken your pulse.

Playing a range of venues and festivals (Splendour, Cherry Rock, Golden Plains, Gumball), Money For Rope continue building on a reputation of balls-out performances that transform quiet crowds into rollicking masses show after show after show.

And with a sound that's equal parts style and sweat coupled with their masterclass in showmanship, you're guaranteed a Money For Rope experience that's bound to leave you breathless, with a post-'Rope afterglow destined to make you clamour for more - whether on stage or in stereo.

By day these boys are talking about the footy, going fishing and working their day jobs, but trade-out their pint glasses for instruments and you've got a recipe for chaotic, ambling musical mayhem tied together by harmonies and driven by the spirit of rock.

Felix Martin, a fellow member of Hot Chip, is a musician, producer & DJ. Tom Hopkins is a studio engineer and electronic composer who has worked with a number musicians including Janine Rostron (PLANNINGTOROCK), James Murphy and Charles Hayward at Lanark Studio.

Their first album "Yesterday Was Lived & Lost" was released in March 2012 on their own label Lanark Recordings, following the release of two limited edition 12"s. The album was well received by critics and described by Pitchfork as "that rarest of spin-offs: the one that lives up to the original".

Drawing inspiration from their extensive experience of touring, Doyle, Martin & Hopkins were accompanied by four other musicians for a 7 piece live show that they took around the UK and Europe. They also made two sold out appearances in New York and took a trip to Austin for the South by Southwest Festival. The band features a bewilderingly varied and energetic blend of synthesisers, guitars, drum machines, percussion and steel pan.

In 2012, New Build also found time to write the full musical score for a forthcoming HBO produced documentary "The One That Got Away", the extraordinary story of Thomas Beck and Edith Greiman who were reunited and fell in love 60 years after being separated in a Hungarian concentration camp (see www.theonethatgotawayfilm.com for more information). The film was screened at the Big Sky Film Festival in Montana in February 2013.

Recorded in studios across America during North Mississippi Allstars’ 2016 tour, Prayer For Peace sees the Dickinsons weaving their bred-to-the-bone musical sensibility with unstoppable energy, rhythmic reinvention, and a potent message of positivity, family, and hope. As ever, songs pay homage to the country blues legacy while simultaneously pushing it into contemporary relevance with fatback funk, electronic innovation, slippery soul, and pure unadulterated rock ‘n’ roll.

“This is a very exciting time for North Mississippi Allstars,” Cody says. “There’s been this explosion of creativity lately and it’s encouraging that for a band who has been around for twenty years now, our music is as vital and fresh as ever. It’s like the opposite of burnout – I can’t explain why but it feels totally brand new again.”

Prayer For Peace continues the burst of inspiration begun with 2013’s Earth-shaking 'World Boogie Is Coming'. That album, the band’s seventh studio recording, proved the planetary sensation its title promised, with The Guardian simply declaring it the North Mississippi Allstars’ “best yet.”

A notoriously hard touring band from the start, North Mississippi Allstars had long considered ways to maximize their time on the road by recording as much as possible while traveling America and beyond.

“Having our studio here in Mississippi has always been a great resource for us,” Cody says. “It’s kept our music grounded, but at the same time, I have always wanted to do what I think of as ‘field recordings,’ of us on tour, on location, wherever we were.”

The Allstars spent much of 2016 lighting up studios in St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Austin, and of course, their legendary father Jim Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch in the Allstars’ own Hernando, MS. Sold out shows were followed the next morning with equally intense sessions, the band quickly banging out tracks infused with the same high energy as they bring to the stage.

“Our dad was a big fan of capturing that initial moment of creation and inception,” Cody says. “There’s a real strength in building up the material onstage, having it crowd-tested, and then just going in and laying it down.”

“We do it so fast,” Luther says. “We go in and record four or five tunes in a couple of hours. In and out. It’s not belabored, it’s raw and fresh and live, we’re dripping sweat and in the moment. That’s why it has that electric psychedelic feel. We just go in there and let it all hang out, clean up the mess later. We don’t even listen to playbacks – we just play, play, play and then split.”

The majority of 'Prayer For Peace' was co-produced at Memphis’ famed Royal Studios alongside the great Boo Mitchell – himself the son of a legend in producer/Hi Records founder Willie Mitchell.

“Boo is such a magical music man,” Luther says, “and that studio is so inspiring and grounding. You would think singing on Al Green’s mic would be intimidating but it’s not! It’s reassuring. Royal is just a wonderful, wonderful studio.”

“We have always identified with other second and third generation artists,” says Cody and to be sure North Mississippi Allstars have long allied with the families of Hill Country icons like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. 'Prayer For Peace' continues the tradition, with contributions from Graeme Lesh (Midnight North, The Terrapin Family Band) and singer/fife player Shardé Thomas, daughter of Mississippi blues giant Otha Turner. A number of other friends also join the congregation, among them legendary bassist Oteil Burbridge (Allman Brothers Band, Dead & Company), vocalist Sharisse Norman, and bassist Dominic Davis (Jack White).

'Prayer For Peace' sees the Allstars putting their indelible stamp on classic blues numbers and folk traditionals, including Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “61 Highway” and “You Got To Move,” the latter featuring smoking hot accompaniment from Hill Country guitar hero Kenny Brown and award-winning singer/bassist Danielle Nicole.

“I think it’s our responsibility to the community that brought us up to protect the repertoire,” Luther says. “To keep the repertoire alive and vibrant. That’s what folk music is about. It’s an oral history of America. My dad and his friends, they learned from Furry Lewis and Gus Cannon and Will Shade and then taught those songs to us. It’s important for us to write songs and experiment and do other things, but playing our community’s music in a modern way is what Cody and I do best. I think it’s what we were meant to do.”

Where 'Prayer For Peace' truly builds upon the repertoire is with a number of Luther-penned originals. “Prayer For Peace” is among North Mississippi Allstars’ most immediate new songs, a beat-crazy appeal for unity that like the band itself, stands as a righteous celebration of multiculturalism, inclusion, and compassion.

“It’s not a protest record,” Cody says. “Its message is to bring people together. My dad used to say North Mississippi Allstars make a statement just by walking on stage.”

Luther says. "One thing R.L. Burnside taught us was that you can play the saddest song in the world, but if you do it with a smile on your face, you can make a whole roomful of people dance. That’s what this record is about. Making people dance.”

That seemingly modest but oh-so-necessary objective will keep the Dickinsons on the road they love for the foreseeable future, ideally recording another LP while continuing to shake audiences young and old with genuine, unadulterated blues power.

“Now it’s time to hit the road,” Luther Dickinson says. “Get to work and spread the word. We recorded this one in the spirit of our twentieth anniversary. Now we’re looking towards our twenty-fifth. Twenty years is alright but twenty five is monumental.”

Exciting audiences around the world he presents songs from his early days in Led Zeppelin to his more recent adventures in the heartland of the United States in dizzy collisions of rhythm and power.

His current companions have created a performance that digs deep into the roots of the blues turning ancient, dark music that inspired so much British and American rock on its head. He has mixed crazy trans-rhythms and psychedelia to create a powerful and unique adventure.

Drawing on musique concréte, found sounds, early electronics, synths and tape loops the Workshop created the other-worldly soundtrack to some of BBC TV and radio’s most iconic programs: The Body in Question, Horizon, Quatermass, Newsround, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chronicle and Delia Darbyshire’s iconic Doctor Who Theme - still the high water mark for British electronic music nearly 50 years after it was recorded.

Their influence on popular music has been profound. From The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Eno to many of today's successful electronic artists and DJs (who have ensured the RWS albums are amongst the most sampled recorded works ever) - the Workshop’s legacy continues to grow.

Now, more than 15 years after the Workshop was decommissioned by the BBC, original members Peter Howell, Roger Limb, Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland and archivist Mark Ayres are working together again. A forthcoming album - Electricity - and a live show spanning their extraordinary 55 year career mark the rebirth of this influential experimental group of musicians.

Festival Number 6 is the first time the Radiophonic Workshop have appeared live since 2009’s Short Circuit show at London’s Roundhouse.

Until her recent signing to Columbia Records, Lucy Rose had none of this, but her heart-stoppingly poignant songs and cracked porcelain voice saw her enter 2012 with YouTube hits, radio plays and crowds like nobody else out there. Such is her fan-base, she now sells out 500-capacity venues with ease, and at the tender age of 23, Lucy is being tipped by the great and the good as the one New British Artist who may stick around longer than any of the other fly-by-night contenders.

“Gentle, folky, confidential tone, undershot by a coolness of intelligence and self possession” 4/5 The Daily Telegraph

(Pop CD of the Week)

“A bewitching one-off talent” Daily Star

“Dark-hearted pop songs that strive for the epic” Q Magazine

“A resounding affirmation of a consummate talent” 4/5 Daily Mirror

“A beautiful voice” The Sun

“Miss Rose’s unassuming charm ticks off everything on the How To Make Your Fans Adore You checklist” 7/10 NME

“Each song is a confessional of her most tightly clasped secrets” The Fly

“One of the country’s most promising new voices” “Utterly beautiful” Sunday Times (Culture)

“It was only a matter of time before the second wave of British nu-folk pioneers made it to the U.S, and Lucy Rose is sure to be among its first breakout stars” Vogue.com

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Emilíana Torrini began singing at an early age as the member of several different choirs. Her Italian heritage and her raw talent lead the young singer and her soprano voice toward opera, which she studied formally from the age of 15.

After finishing her musical education, Emilíana Torrini found herself drawn towards commercial rather than operatic singing. An initial compromise was her time spent as a member of the Icelandic artistic group GusGus. The group was an acting and musical collective, but became well known throughout Iceland for their electronic music. Emilíana Torrini contributed extensively to the group’s 1997 album “Polydistortion”.

Other successful collaborations followed for Emilíana Torrini after her work with GusGus, and the singer found her song writing skills in demand by pop princess Kylie Minogue. Emilíana Torrini co-wrote the songs “Slow”, which went to number one in multiple countries including the UK, and “Someday” from Kylie Minogue’s 2003 album “Body Language”. In addition to her work with Kylie Minogue, Emilíana Torrini is credited with having written songs for the band Thievery Corporation and has contributed vocals for artists such as Paul Oakenfold.

Emilíana Torrini has released eight solo studio albums since 1995 and has achieved two number one songs in her native Iceland with tracks “To Be Free” and “Jungle Drum”. Her indie pop sound is energetic and infectious and her song-writing abilities are vast. This combination of talent definitely explains her success as both a solo artist and as a creative collaborator, and it is almost certain that her work will shine within the music industry for quite some time to come.

She releases her new collaborative album with The Colorist on Rough Trade on December 9th 2016.

‘Lay It On Me’ received its worldwide premiere this morning via triple j’s breakfast team, and is the first taste of new music from Vance Joy since 2014’s hugely successful, ARIA #1 debut album, Dream Your Life Away. The album is certified platinum in Australia with 115,000 sales and includes the singles ‘Riptide’ (8x platinum) ‘Fire and the Flood’ (3x platinum), Georgia (2x platinum) and Mess Is Mine (2x platinum).

I had this guitar riff I had been playing for ages but had never found a home for. When it was glued together with a lyric I had in my phone, "everything starts at your skin", the song started to make sense. – Vance Joy

The stunning, cinematic video, directed by acclaimed US director Mimi Cave, sees Vance Joy performing alongside US actress Angela Sarafyan of the HBO series ‘Westworld’.

The homecoming shows, presented by Frontier Touring, will take place at The Forum Theatre in Melbourne on November 22 and the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on November 23 and mark his first headline performances in Australia since last April’s sold-out ‘Fire and the Flood’ Tour. Joining Vance Joy will be Gretta Ray who burst onto the scene last year after winning triple j’s Unearthed High competition with her single ‘Drive’. She has followed up with the gorgeous track ‘Towers’.

In addition to the Melbourne and Sydney dates, Vance Joy is also set to perform at this year’s Splendour in the Grass Festival in Byron Bay and Spilt Milk in Canberra. Fans can expect to hear favourites from Dream Your Life Away, in addition to a handful of new songs.

In between the Australian touring, Vance Joy will resume his globe-trotting ways, with a bunch of major festival dates already confirmed for the US and Canada including New York City’s Panorama, Chicago’s Lollapalooza, San Francisco’s Outside Lands, Austin’s City Limits Music Festival and Montreal’s Osheaga Festival.

The success of Dream Your Life Away has been global. The album has now sold over 1.7 million copies worldwide including over a million in the US alone. In addition to its platinum status in Australia, the album is 4x platinum in Sweden, 3x platinum in Ireland, 2x in Colombia, Italy and the Netherlands and platinum in France, Norway and Switzerland. Single sales in the US now exceed 6 million, with global Spotify streams totalling more than a whopping, one billion. To add to 2013’s Hottest 100 crown, ‘Riptide’ was also awarded 2014’s APRA Song of the Year and this year’s Most Played Australian Work Overseas. Globally, Vance Joy was named the recipient of the International Songwriting Competition’s Grand Prize with perfect scores (2014) and ASCAP’s ‘Pop Work of the Year’ (2016) also for ‘Riptide’ and the #1 Most Played Artist at Alternative radio in the US for 2015 The very same year, he served as direct support on Taylor Swift’s ‘1989 World Tour’ and scooped an ARIA Award for Best Male Artist. His headline ‘Fire and the Flood’ tour saw him sell more than 170,000 tickets worldwide.

Singer Ty Taylor, guitarist Nalle Colt, bassist Rick Barrio Dill, and drummer Richard Danielson have successfully channeled the vitality of their live show into a fresh and urgent take on Primitive Soul, a groove-fueled sound that Yahoo! once painted as “James Brown singing lead for Led Zeppelin” and “blending blues, soul, and riff-heavy rock & roll with joyfully gritty abandon.”

Longtime devotees of incendiary artists like Ike & Tina Turner, Little Richard, and

Chuck Berry, Vintage Trouble possesses sharply honed instincts for rhythm and groove and unabashed showmanship. Now based in L.A.’s musically famed Laurel Canyon, the band first played together in 2010 and soon brought their high-energy brand of soul to weekly residencies at local venues like the Edison and Harvelle’s Blues Club. As they steadily amassed a following, Vintage Trouble eventually drew the attention of Doc McGhee (a legendary music manager best known for working with KISS, Bon Jovi, and Mötley Crüe). Once under McGhee’s wing, the band set their sights overseas and — by 2011 — had taken the stage at Britain’s influential TV show Later...with Jools Holland, delivering powerful performances of “Blues Hand Me Down” and “Nancy Lee” (a stirring serenade to Taylor’s mother, penned from his father’s perspective).

After joining Queen guitarist Brian May on tour in May 2011 and Bon Jovi on tour that June, Vintage Trouble put out their debut album The Bomb Shelter Sessions and quickly saw the album hit the UK Top 40. Also charting as the No. 1 R&B album and No. 2 rock album on Amazon UK, The Bomb Shelter Sessions had its U.S. release in April 2012 and fast earned acclaim from such outlets as NPR, The Wall Street Journal and Billboard. By the end of the year, in the pages of the New York Times, critic Val Haller had hailed Vintage Trouble as a modern-day answer to Otis Redding (“Like Otis Redding,” Haller remarked, “Vintage Trouble makes music that is a little bit of everything”).

Along with appearing on Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (four times!), The View, Conan, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, as well as at major festivals like Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Glastonbury, Vintage Trouble continued to keep up a grueling touring schedule in support of The Bomb Shelter Sessions. The band spent a large part of this time opening for such artists as The Who, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Lenny Kravitz, Paloma Faith, Joss Stone and Willie Nelson.

At a hometown gig at the El Rey Theatre in summer 2013, Don Was (a three-time Grammy Award-winner known for his work with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Al Green, and Iggy Pop) caught the band live for the first time and found him floored by their explosive performance. “Half of the songs were brand new and totally unfamiliar to the audience…yet the place was rocking from the first notes straight through to the final encore,” recalls Was. “Do you know how hard it is for a new band to pull that off? It requires tremendous charisma, thundering power, incredible grooves, and top-notch songwriting.”

In the spring of 2015, Vintage Trouble inked a deal with Blue Note Records, and set to work on their major label debut 1 Hopeful Rd. Recorded at L.A.’s East West Studios and mixed by Tom Elmhirst (Mark Ronson, U2, The Black Keys), 1 Hopeful Rd. borrows its title from the album’s opening number and lead single “Run Like the River.” With its foot-stomping rhythm and gospel harmonies, “Run Like the River” embodies the infectiously irrepressible mood that runs throughout 1 Hopeful Rd. and gives even the album’s most pained moments an electrifying edge. The follow-up to Vintage Trouble’s debut album The Bomb Shelter Sessions — a self-released effort praised by Paste magazine as “the stuff the best soul’n’roll is made of” — 1 Hopeful Rd. matches that emotional intensity with a raw yet sophisticated musicianship that’s prompted BBC Radio 6 to crown the band “the heirs of rhythm and blues.”

With Vintage Trouble fiercely dedicated to constantly playing and creating new music — including a 2014 fan-only EP called The Swing House Acoustic Sessions – music legends such Prince (who name-checked Vintage Trouble in an early-2014 interview with MOJO) and Lenny Kravitz (who noted that the Vintage Trouble live experience bears the same feeling as “being at the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967”) were struck by the band’s passion and musical prowess. When describing their own sound, Vintage Trouble use the term “formatted recklessness”: a fantastically paradoxical phrase that captures the spirit of a band whose music is wildly unhinged but rooted in real musicality, gut-punching but thought-provoking, steeped in the heritage of old-school soul but utterly and irresistibly timeless.

In January 2017, John Varvatos tapped the band to appear in his much-celebrated music campaign series, bringing their foot-stomping rhythm and irrepressible spirit to electrify his new Spring / Summer 2017 Campaign. Throughout 2017, Vintage Trouble will release a handful of new songs starting with the blistering new track “Knock Me Out,” released on February 15th.

Vintage Trouble shows no signs of slowing down. Stay tuned for a lot more exciting music.

Bristling with energy and oozing optimism, Great Divide is a rock record with widescreen ambition, inspired by the band watching their own fans and from sharing stages with the likes of Springsteen and Foo Fighters.

“Our aim was always to make songs this size,” says Twin Atlantic singer Sam McTrusty. “Coming from a punk rock background, it took a while - we like to say we went the scenic route. But it was the right route for us, full of interesting stops on which we learnt a lot – about ourselves, about each other, about how to make music that connects with fans which is always honest, never forced.”

Almost three years and over 300 gigs since the release of their silver-selling, debut album, Free, catapulted them from clubs to sold-out shows at Shepherds Bush Empire to the main stage at Reading and Leeds and this summer, Glastonbury, Twin Atlantic have made a mainstream record that marries their incredible energy live with a more mature approach to songwriting that acknowledges their long-held love of pop. Great Divide may be driven by guitars and drums, but it is also steeped in piano and strings, built on soaring melodies and littered with lyrics, sung in McTrusty’s strong Scottish accent, that express grown-up emotions as chantalong slogans.

“We’ve been through our punk rock rebellion phase and come out the other side,” laughs McTrusty. “We’ve all grown up being in this band. Dare I say it, we’re finally fully-formed adults. Since Free, some of us have got married and bought our own places and I’ve spent time in Canada because my girlfriend lives there. When the four of us got back together to work on this album, there was no bullshit. With our own lives sorted, it was easier to see the point of the songs and how we wanted them to sound. And, definitely, part of that was embracing pop.”

Pop hooks and harmonies abound on songs such as Hold On, an ode to self-belief driven by drums it’s difficult not to dance to. ‘It’s a risk worth taking/To

have a life worth living’ sings McTrusty on a huge, hooky chorus that’s a surefire summer singalong. The stunning Brothers And Sisters, set to shimmering guitars, bulked up by multi layered vocals and boasting a soft-loud dynamic is a collective call-to-arms dedicated to those who refuse to give up on their dreams.

Flamboyant first single Heart and Soul is a dirty rock stomper that sums up the shared feelings of a bouncing festival crowd, nods to both classic Bon Jovi and Queen and has already moved George Ergatoudis, Radio 1’s head of music, to tweet ‘Hyperbole alert. No joke - STUNNING does not do them justice.’ The single went in at number 17, a phenomenal achievement for a rock band in this day and age.

Twin Atlantic formed in 2007 when McTrusty and bassist Ross McNae, a friend from school, joined forces with drummer Craig Kneale and lead guitarist and occasional cello player Barry McKenna. All four had been in previous bands on the Glasgow scene. They bonded over a shared love of alternative rock, punk-pop and the city’s skate and street art scene, as well as a determination to make music their day jobs. Their ferocious shows soon saw them booked to support Smashing Pumpkins, Biffy Clyro and their teen idols Blink 182. Within two years, they had played most major UK festivals and been signed, following a tip-off from Alan McGee, to American label Red Bull Records.

“Our A&R person saw us at this strange snowboarding Channel 4 gig at Battersea Power Station,” recalls Kneale. “We pure went for it at that show, not because we knew anyone was watching, but because we were fucking freezing. We were surrounded by fake snow, our hands so cold we couldn’t hold our guitars. Either we went for it or we froze. Our A&R said it was the craziest gig he’d ever witnessed.”

A mini album, Vivarium, released in 2009, found Twin Atlantic fans in Kerrang!, saw them tour Europe and the States, play festivals including Download and Sonisphere and support My Chemical Romance. Free, their debut proper, followed two years later, boasting three singles playlisted by Radio 1, including the title track, which soundtracked Felix Baumgartner’s historic space jump in 2012.

“We were told Felix himself chose it,” says Kneale, “because he liked the lyric ‘Set my body on fire so I can be free’.” I guess he knew something could go horribly wrong. Thank God it didn’t! It wouldn’t have been a good epitaph for us.”

Most of Great Divide was written last year, while Twin Atlantic were still touring Free. “90% of it was written in the back of the tour bus, or a sweltering van in America,” says McTrusty. “Our adrenaline was through the roof because, for the first time, thousands of people had come to see us. I’d be in the lounge, unable to sleep, recording ideas on my phone, trying to make sense of the reaction we’d had to our songs. You can’t hear 10,000 people singing a chorus back at you and not be changed by it.

“I’d sit there thinking ‘I wish I’d had this type of song’ or been able to make people feel a certain way. I tried to write for people who don’t dance, and

didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help it cos the energy of the song meant they couldn’t stand still.

“I was definitely inspired by playing with Bruce Springsteen, who we supported at Hard Rock Calling last year. Every song of his is an anthem, even if it’s weird and complicated. You can’t see Springsteen and not remember it the next time you write.”

The bulk of Great Divide was recorded in Rockfield in Wales with producer Gil Norton (Foo Fighters, Pixies), who also helmed Free. Additional songs were recorded in the States with Jacknife Lee (Snow Patrol, U2, R.E.M.). The Rockfield sessions lasted much longer than had been planned and almost broke the band.

“We were there, between festivals, for most of last summer,” recalls McTrusty. “Remember how good the weather was? We were ridiculously decadent, lying in the sun, bringing back loads of alcohol. We bought a big projector screen, played FIFA and watched nearly every James Bond film.

“At the start it was amazing. We were inspired by stories of the bands who had been there before us. We used the piano that’s on Bohemian Rhapsody. But by the end, when the album still wasn’t finished, the place started to feel too isolated. Silence to me is terrifying – I’m from inner city Glasgow, I’ve always lived on a main road.”

One of the results of the extended Rockfield sessions was the song Oceans, Twin Atlantic’s favourite on the album. “Oceans could only have been written somewhere like that,” says McTrusty. “It sounds like a cry from an unhinged, isolated person, which is what I became there.”

Hold On also took on new meaning, becoming a metaphor for a band at breaking point. “There were a lot of frayed ends and decisions to make,” says McTrusty. “Hold On was us telling ourselves to not give up, that we’d get there in the end. Did we ever think the end was nigh? I’m not sure, but we did hold on and we made it and that’s what matters.”

Their set cruises through early Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues, Do Wop, Rockabilly and 60s Soul.

As well as staging their own Mission 45 nights at venues around London and abroad they have also played at various Vintagerocknrollretrosoul hot spots including Buzzsaw Joint, Paper Dress Vintage, The Nitty Gritty and DJ Andy Smith’s Jam up Twist night.

They are also founder members of dj collective Original Dance Music and their night Get Rhythm is on every Thursday at Joe’s in Camden.

On their travels they have dj’ed in Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, New york & San Francisco as well as playing at various festivals including Glastonbury, Secret Garden Party, Kendal Calling, Bandada, Castlepalooza in Ireland and La Batie in Switzerland.

They have recently formed Da7, a musical collaboration with producer Lazlo Legezer. Their first release Dopamine Fiend is out in February 2015.