Our new music roundup featuring caroline, The Null Club, Speedial, Tugboat Captain and Oral Habit.
Photo: El Hardwick | Words: Hazel Blacher, Elvis Thirlwell, Brad Sked
This week's roundup of our favourite alternative new releases includes the very welcome return of caroline, baroque indie loveliness from Speedial and Tugboat Captain, the latest from Gilla Band offshoot The Null Club and furious garage psych from Oral Habit.
caroline – 'Total Euphoria'
Beaming with a messy, climactic effulgence that blasts straight to your core and melts back into the surrounding corporeal walls like buttery, gossamer clouds weeping into the dusk, caroline's 'Total Euphoria' is a song that lives up to its name. The new single sees the London 8-piece make a welcome return after the long absence that followed their acclaimed self-titled debut back in 2022, and it marks a further broadening and shifting of their sound to date. Cascading drum and guitar syncopations seem to trip over one another without ever fully falling, instead billowing into a crescendoing ether of transcendental drone fuzz, where violins purr and vocalists Jasper Llewellyn and Magdalena McLean ripple above in ardent equilibrium. Capturing an inexpressible humanness with its expansive, organically unfolding post-rock lustre, at its unspoken spiritual heart, 'Total Euphoria' is the kind of song that reminds you that once we weren't creatures at all but the tiny specks of dust that blink back at us in the beautiful, fleeting chaos of being. (Hazel Blacher)
Speedial – 'Tourist'
Through a meticulous circulation of twanging guitars and jazzed-up saxophones, Speedial's latest single 'Tourist' wavers between the sensuous and pillowy to the subtly disturbed. Grounding this dramatic composition like rocks in the storm are the dual lead vocals of Serena Garrod and Millie Kirby. The song offers an evocative expression of guilt and self-distrust, the duo weathering Serena's lyric depicting "an exaggerated 'evil' version" of herself and coming out the other side exuding strength and defiance. Produced by verified doyen of the South London, Joseph Futak, to dig into Speedial is to pluck another nourishing fruit from the e abundance of the capital's grassroots melange, rich with assemblies of artists delighting in ever more dazzling orchestral conceits. (Elvis Thirlwell)
The Null Club – 'Frameshift'
Like an anxiously churning stomach if it was patch-cabled up to an analogue synth and mechanised into a state of pummelled distortion, The Null Club's 'Frameshift' pulses with a restless yet suppressed robotic terror. Helmed by Gilla Band guitarist Alan Duggan-Borges, the side project sees the Irish musician exploring an equally coarse and industrial sound to his other endeavours, this time leaning into a decidedly more electronic and experimental palette that spans from hip-hop to musique concrète. The track serves as the second single from his self-titled EP due this April, and features a blistering, free-flowing verse from NYC rapper ELUCID. Slicing through the shadowy dissonance of its whirring synth oscillations with a torrent of urgent and angular machine-driven rhythms, 'Frameshift' festers and bubbles its way towards an intoxicating, detached oblivion. (Hazel Blacher)
Tugboat Captain – 'Nothing Embarrassing'
Tugboat Captain's 'Nothing Embarrassing' emits a homely fireside warmth, swaddling you with the safety of a soft, fleecy blanket at the end of a long and arduous day. The single arrives alongside an announcement of their new album 'Dog Tale', due for release this April, and is lyrically centred around the slow, everyday intimacy and trust that augments over the course of a long relationship. Based around a simple vocal melody shared between project leader Sox and Sophia Bartlett, Dougal James and Joshua Cobb, the song is delicately buoyed with sweeping string and clarinet arrangements that complement the track's roving bassline and tinkling acoustic guitars. Oozing with a wholesome baroque-pop sophistication that calls to mind artists like Andy Shauf, 'Nothing Embarrassing' sees the London sextet balancing relative simplicity with an understated elegance and clear compositional dexterity. (Hazel Blacher)
Oral Habit – 'Sauerkraut'
Whisper it quietly, but there might well be a modest British psychedelic renaissance going on right now with the likes of Mandrake Handshake, Daisy Rickman, Moreish Idols, Melin Melyn, Dreamwave and Fergy LH being just a handful of acts that have released mind-warpers within the last year. The latest from the psychedelic whirlpool emerges Oral Habit hailing from the ever-burgeoning Brighton scene, who have unleashed a two-minute psychedelic garage-rock ripper in 'Sauerkraut'. An Oh Sees-esque cadence with space-time tearing garage-punk riffs is honeyed by a smokey croon akin to Danny Lee Blackwell of Night Beats as 'Sauerkraut' unfurls as a fuzzed-out psychedelic brain bender. (Brad Sked)
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