Another month, another set of /Tracks of the Month.

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There’s been some really interesting stuff coming out of late, too, with new bands to me, new “supergroups”, old friends returning with new material, and the usual mix of styles too. Of course, a couple of great new releases arrived just too late to feature this month, so they will appear next time.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Track of the Month

/Egalitarianism Today
/Thousand Yard Stare
/Full Anarchism

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Any band that describes themselves as “Crass meets Technotronic” and “synthpunk theyliens for abolition, decolonization, and total liberation” is going to grab my attention, and the acid-synths and sneering vocals of Thousand Yard Stare brings to mind the much-missed London industrial-punks Katscan, first and foremost. But this a song about the darker corners of the mind, where past trauma has resulted into a blank mind that cannot deal or cope with the present, and the song has a nervous tension, particularly to the vocals, that explodes into unsettling fury at regular intervals. A fascinating, unrelenting release that sounds very different to anything currently active in the industrial realm.

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/Sevendials
/Obsession
/A Crash Course In Catastrophe

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Amid an album of powerful industrial-rock-meets-post-punk – as might be expected from a supergroup involving Chris Connelly, Paul Ferguson and Mark Gemini Thwaite – are a couple of surprising and exceptional covers. One opens the album, a thrilling take on the classic Sparks track Number One Song In Heaven, but the other is a pummelling version of the 80s hit by Animotion, Obsession. It’s been covered by a number of alternative artists over the years – particularly notable was The Azoic with Frank Spinath of Seabound’s version. Here the darker tones of the obsessive nature of the song are teased out, with Chris Connelly’s growling menace accompanied by the sultry vocals of Ashley Bad, and the result is a fantastic, pitch-dark reimagining of a song that perhaps was always a whole lot darker than the sparkling pop production ever suggested. A number of remixes have now popped up on Streaming services, but to these ears stick with the album version.

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/Pop Will Eat Itself
/Bruiser

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It feels like it’s been an age – certainly since the last album – but the Poppies have been touring regularly in recent years, and this is the latest of a handful of singles that have trickled out since COVID. Bruiser is their best song in some time, too, a skittering breakbeat underpinning a track that nods to punk and rave in equal measure (just check that synth solo!), as Graham Crabb and Mary Biker trade vocals and samples elbow their way in, too. The band have – perhaps understandably, going on the strength of their back catalogue in these nostalgia-obsessed times – concentrated on delivering the old favourites for fans in recent years, but this fantastic track reminds that the Greebo veterans still have something in the tank to bring the new.

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/Circuit Preacher
/Killed Something
/Heaven Can’t Heal

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There’s been a bit of a buzz from friends across the Atlantic recently about this trio, especially their live performances. They certainly appear to be an intriguing proposition: building from the sound and image of old-school EBM (Nitzer Ebb looms large in their influences, without a shadow of a doubt, but the vocal delivery owes more to Trent Reznor), but with much of their lyrical content musing on the power of faith, and the damage that it can cause in the self. The ominous, shadowy Killed Something builds in intensity, with the lyrics here questioning why they were conditioned to see their own thinking as sinful, and what long-lasting effects that it had. Elsewhere on the album, there are some fabulous, punchy EBM bangers – they are surely club-bound if they aren’t already – and this is definitely an artist to keep an eye on.

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/Death In Vegas
/While My Machines Gently Weep
/Death Mask

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Richard Fearless was one of the DJs at the forefront of the London “Big Beat” and techno scene in the 1990s, although his musical output as Death in Vegas (with an ever-evolving and changing list of collaborators over the years) has shown him to have a restless energy, with each album sounding rather different to the last. The first album, Dead Elvis, had sludgy, bass-heavy tracks that suited the grimy nature of Big Beat clubs (and suited remixing into almost every style imaginable at the time), while the follow-up The Contino Sessions brought them to the mainstream, with a number of guest vocalists taking tracks to really dark corners (such as Iggy Pop’s star turn on Aisha, and the drug nightmares Bobby Gillespie invokes on Soul Auctioneer).

Those days are long gone, though, and Fearless is now exploring noisy techno and industrial elements, it seems. From the new album Death Mask, out in a couple of weeks, and the first Death In Vegas album in nine years, While My Machines Gently Weep is a stark, cold track. The precise rhythm is like a heartbeat racing that bit too fast, the synths drone like distant city hubbub at night, and it sounds absolutely fantastic: but there’s still that feeling of detachment that was present in Death in Vegas tracks nearly thirty years ago (there are echoes of Rekkit in this, to my ears). It’s great to have them back.

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/Skunk Anansie
/An Artist Is An Artist
/The Painful Truth

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While it’s been nine years since Anarchytecture, Skunk Anansie haven’t been idle in the meantime: working with The Academy of Contemporary Music on a scholarship scheme, guitarist Ace’s work in musical education, vocalist Skin getting an OBE, not to mention touring and releasing a handful of singles. So maybe there were reasons why it took so long for a new album! The opening track from the new album is a classic case of the band putting their best foot forward (opening tracks on their albums have always done so, it seems), with Skin addressing the idea of music being a thing for younger artists. As Skin gets older, she appears to give even less fucks than she did before (and that’s saying something!), and this scorching track reminds that the band are just as vital as ever, both as spokespeople and as an important figurehead for minority voices in music, but also as a shit-kicking rock band.

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/Alison Goldfrapp
/Reverberotic
/Flux

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Despite my love of Goldfrapp, which goes back to their first album, there was something about Alison Goldfrapp’s first solo album The Love Invention that I just couldn’t get into, and I was fearing the same for new album Flux having heard first single Find Xanadu. And then Reverberotic dropped. Goldfrapp were always at their best when they departed from the norm, and the sultry, woozy beats of this are glorious, with Alison Goldfrapp’s voice weaving up and down her considerable vocal range to spectacular effect. The best song from Alison Goldfrapp in some time…

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/Suede
/Disintegrate
/Antidepressants

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While this monthly roundup is always new music, it’s not unusual to find long-lived artists features – but it does feel unusual this week for artists I’ve been following for decades to be dominating the list. That’s just the way release schedules have worked out, I guess – and perhaps with the pressures of work and other things at the moment, I’ve not quite had the time to be hunting for genuinely new artists to me as I might normally have. But then, with Suede being as great as they are at the moment, of course I was going to feature them. Last album Autofiction was their best in many, many years, with a rawer, powerful edge than the lush experimentation of other post-reformation albums, and lead single Disintegrate has a furious power to it that suggests Suede are happy with this new era of the band. The song drops into an impressive, elegant chorus that is Suede through and through, and the feeling is one of a band who still sound and are vital.

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/Philip Jeays
/The Rain
/Victoria

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After a period dealing with cancer – apparently he’s now “back to normal” – and the difficulties of the COVID-era, it’s perhaps understandable that there is less of the defiance, and more of reflection on Jeay’s new, and twelfth, album. A long list of collaborators means that there are lush, complex arrangements in some songs, and interesting other voices appear to accompany Jeays on some songs, but for me the songs that are very much “him” are the best. The gorgeous set-piece of The Rain is one, where Jeays acts as some silent, unseen observer in the city somewhere – my initial thought is under the canopy outside London Victoria station, perhaps (his route back home to the Sussex coast). He observes interactions of love, of anger, of youthful innocence, all linked by being soaked in the rain as their days get better or worse. Philip Jeays has always been a phenomenal chronicler of life’s moments, and this song might well be one of his best.

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/Death Pill
/Craterface
/Sologamy

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An album named after the concept of a personal commitment to self-care and acceptance – some feat bearing in mind that this Ukrainian trio are currently separated between Kyiv (Ukraine), Spain and Australia, and have clearly had to endure a lot since their homeland was invaded and partially illegally occupied by Russia. The first single from the album is the ripping Craterface, bottled-up rage and fury unleashed in one two-and-a-half minute song, and it’s absolutely great. There’s nods to hardcore punk, death metal (those riffs!), even a bit of grindcore, but most importantly, it’s the sound of three women who’ve had their worlds turned upside-down by appalling events out of their control, and have found at least a bit of catharsis by making fantastic music.