"Here is the thing"

 01. Protomartyr - Relatives in descent
02. Oxbow - Thin Black Duke
03. Slowdive - Slowdive
04. Grizzly Bear - Painted ruins
05. Elbow - Little fictions
06. AmenRa - Mass VI
07. Idles - Brutalism
08. St. Vincent - Masseduction
09. Björk - Utopia
10. Queens of the Stone Age - Villains
11.  Spoon - Hot thoughts
12. The Horrors - V
13. Jane Weaver - Modern kosmology
14. Xiu Xiu - Forget
15. Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss spun
16. The Clientele - Music for the age of miracles
17. Ben Frost - The centre cannot hold
18. Nadine Shah - Holiday destination
19. The National - Sleep well beast
20. Mogwai - Every country’s sun
21. Oiseaux-TempêteAL​-​'AN ! الآن (And your night is your shadow — a fairy​-​tale piece of land to make our dreams)

Αγαπημένο EP
Blonde Redhead - 3 o'clock EP



"Vanishing act"


Air Formation's Matt Bartam: "Sometimes you wish you could just disappear... Be free of any responsibility, show your true emotions without consequence, go back to the way you were in those rose tinted days gone by...
"Vanishing Act" is that voice inside your head telling you can do that. The increased tempo of the middle section reflects the rush of euphoria before reality hits and it all comes crashing down again."









"You’ve got me punk drunk, trembling, I’m moving to the space you’re in"

Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe: "I guess any band is a remarkable feat of human endeavour in that you function with this sort of synchronicity, you're in clockwork with one another, you hold gravity on one another. We've always been a full-blooded band and we never really wanted to compromise...
Although our stories are all individual, we all had the same love and care for what we had created. The way I see a band is as the coming together of minds and of people. If you look at our band, there was a certain sense that you couldn't take one person away and it still be intact. That's something I'm proud of.
"Punk Drunk and Trembling" was never designed to be our parting song but in many ways it's fitting because it's the most highly evolved song of all of ours. It started in fragments around the first album and it's taken the entire journey of our career to come to the fore. There's something beautiful and poignant about goodbyes and that song burns as brightly as when we first emerged."



"I only call you when you're in my dreams"

Chelsea Wolfe: "Each song has many worlds inside it. A way for me to bring the songs together on this record was a list of short words with big meanings: flux, hiss, welt, groan, swarm, spun, scrape, [and] strain. They became a sort of guide. Flux represents movement and flow. Hiss is life force and white noise. Welt is the brutality of life, [and] groan represented sensuality and death."













"She's just trying to reach you..."

Protomartyr's Joe Casey: "I like allegories, fake stories, old bits of news and somewhat ridiculous imagery. The music the fellas come up with fires my brain in that way. It allows me to sing about dire things like politics, human existence and life-draining jobs without being too hectoring. Politics, like anything in life, has a way of worming its way into songs... especially since world affairs took on the smell and texture of vomit on the sidewalk as we were writing."



"Two thousand and seventeen"





"Another year gets away, another summer of love..."


The National's Aaron Dessner: "There were long stretches where we wouldn't even be thinking about when we were finishing this record. It allowed for different kinds of experiments to happen... This time, we weren't so interested in constructing a polished or elaborately tightly-knit kind of record. We allowed ourselves to have more sounds that are just hanging out there in the mist."





"But it doesn't matter now. Just come and love me how, like the way you used to do"

Josh Homme: "The most important aspect of making this record was redefining our sound, asking and answering the question, 'What do we sound like now?'. If you can't make a great first record, you should just stop - but if you can make a great record but you keep making records and your sound doesn't evolve, you become a parody of that original sound."



"I can't. She said, I'd save you but I can't love"

Chelsea Wolfe: "I think all the different stuff I've listened to over the years eventually melded into my own weird thing...
One of the main reasons I've kept this project under my own name, even though it's full band most of the time, is that I didn't want to have to compromise on the sound. I wanted to always be able to follow my instincts in writing and allow the music to morph into what it needed to be.
"





"Τι νόημα έχει να ρωτάς ένα καθρέφτη ραγισμένο..."

Διάφανα Κρίνα: "Πήραμε την απόφαση να συνεχίσουμε. Ως οφείλαμε, απέναντι στους εαυτούς μας και απέναντι στους ανθρώπους που αγαπάνε τη μουσική μας. Γιατί πολύ απλά, αυτή η τρελή σφαίρα εξακολουθεί να γυρίζει, περιστρέφοντας μαζί της, όλο αυτό το παράξενο και ωραίο παιχνίδι δίχως νόημα, που είναι η ανθρώπινη ύπαρξη. Είμαστε έτοιμοι να αντιμετωπίσουμε την οποιαδήποτε δυσπιστία. Γιατί αυτή δεδομένων των συνθηκών, είναι ανθρώπινο – για κάποιους – να υπάρχει. Εμείς, θα αφήσουμε το ίδιο μας το έργο να μιλήσει. Γιατί ξέρουμε πολύ καλά πως το έργο είναι αίτημα ζωής, πεισματική άρνηση κάθε συμβιβασμού με τον θάνατο."



"Other people"

Eugene Robinson: "If you've followed any Oxbow record it might feel like being dropped into the middle of a book, which largely, is exactly what’s happening. So making this record was for me, a way to complete the song cycle that started with 'Fuckfest'."









'Thin Black Duke'

Eugene Robinson: "Oxbow's entire oeuvre is as challenging of a thing as I have ever been involved in, and whose "success" was never guaranteed as it was about war with self, others, fate, circumstance and shorn of a moral framework, making it strange to use, but a certain kind of evil. Tough to spend 5 minutes like this. Even tougher to do so for 25 years. Post-Thin Black Duke… the expectation should be for a kinder and more beautiful Oxbow. Because? Because we've earned it. Maybe.
You may not enjoy Thin Black Duke, but it'll be one of the best records you've heard.
"



"Hot thoughts all in your mind, all of the time"

Spoon's Britt Daniel: "'Hot Thoughts' sounds different to our other records - if it was ground we’d covered before, we tried to stay away from it. What Dave [Fridmann] is interested in is fucking things up, making sounds that are abrasive, confrontational or surprising. He says, “Subtlety is our enemy.” To me, the best way to get somewhere is to have a bit of intention with a song, but then you throw some things at it that you never could’ve expected. When that happens, the beautiful stuff comes. So I feel good about where we are now. But it also feels like a dark time."

Follow their traces