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FKA twigs, Ethel Cain, ESNS & More: The Escapist Soundtrack to Shake Off Winter

2025's first digest of music recommendations. An antidote to the news or at least a soundtrack to your doomscrolling.

FKA twigs. Source: YouTube

With the first snowdrops appearing on my walks in the English countryside, we are entering the prevernal - one of the six seasons of the year, as winter transitions into spring. This time of year is perfect to find some new records to hug tight or grab some tickets to see some sweaty gigs (the original 'warm banks').

I compiled this as an antidote to the news (or at least a soundtrack to your doomscrolling). If I can make you one promise, it's that most of the music in this round-up has an escapist magic.

A fun fact before we begin 2025's first of six music digests of the year:

In temperate and sub-polar regions, four seasons based on the Gregorian calendar are generally recognized: spring, summer, autumn (fall), and winter. Ecologists often use a six-season model for temperate climate regions which are not tied to any fixed calendar dates: prevernal, vernal, estival, serotinal, autumnal, and hibernal. Many tropical regions have two seasons: the rainy/wet/monsoon season and the dry season. Some have a third cool, mild, or harmattan season.

Music News
Album Recommendations
4 New Music DiScoveries from ESNS
2 Songs Stuck on Repeat
Recommended reading / watching / listening
Poll: DiS Communities Album of January

NEWS

1) How to report Kanye West's extremist merch that was advertised during the Super Bowl. (Threads)

2) 87% of tracks on Spotify had less than 1000 streams. These acts didn't get paid due to songs with less than 1000 streams being demonetised by Spotify. (BlueSky)

3) Spotify donated 1.7 million kroner ($150k) to Trump's inauguration and hosted a brunch with right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro (Resident Advisor)

4) UK losing grassroots music venue every fortnight as industry demand “action not words” (NME)

5) "The government is taking a huge risk in betting in favour of a relatively modest domestic AI sector against a creative sector that is generating over £120 billion," says UK Music's Tom Kiehl (Music Week) + some tips for filling in the UK Government consultation on AI (LinkedIn)

ICYMI: Meet The Class of 2025

ALBUM OF THE MOMENT

EUSEXUA
by FKA twigs
(Young)

Some artists carve out a lot of space for themselves, not just in the music scene but alongside the windmills in our minds. From the masks of her early EPs to the sword-wielding opus that was MAGDALENE (one of my favourite albums of the 21st Century), the visual landscape of FKA twigs is as important to her work as the beats and the epic moments when the poise becomes bombast. EUSEXUA underlines her ability to soundtrack the everyday - the work out or the concentrated desk session - and make it feel like the sublime.

EUSEXUA is a record that looks as good as it feels. It's sensual days and surreal nights. It's less fantastical than MAGDALENE and more about finding something throbbing beneath the mundane. From the club to the cubicle, from escapism to the intensely present, the night sweats to the cold chill of the dawn, FKA twigs' third album feels most at home when the boundaries blur. It's a record with Vaseline smeared on its sunglasses and crumbs of cake to gently lick from the corner of its lips.

If this were a Letterboxd review, I'd write something like: Students of FKA twigs work to date will love the late 90s Madonna hooks of 'Girl Feels Good', the harps & synths & Kate Bush-ness of 'Keep It, Hold It' and the unexpected appearance of Kim Kardashian's daughter North West rapping in Japanese on 'Childish Things' - a joyous song that feels a little like 'Hong Kong Garden' meets Gwen Stefani's Harajuku-era. Ten out of ten. Will listen again and again and again.

📼 Watch the videos on YouTube.

A RECORD FROM THE MIST

Perverts
by Ethel Cain
(Daughters of Cain/AWAL)

Listening to Perverts for the first time, I found myself focussing on the smallest electrical hisses. The mic static of a room. The brief bursts of high frequencies. Half the time I was unsure if the sounds were coming from my speakers, my stomach, the fridge, the neighbour's washing machine or if I had tuned into an alien broadcast. And reader, I loved being in this heightened listening experience.

From the luxuriously slow start, the record fills the room and bathes you in its sensory sonic world. 15 minutes in and the Malkovich discomfort of crawling into someone's consciousness left me and I began to relish the fact I had been gifted an extended moment to sit with those eternal feelings that dissipate as soon as you sense them in a hypnagogic state, sliding in and out of sleep.

Third listen to the record and I scribble incoherent notes: Somewhere between languishing and longing. The wordlessness of an open mouth but a cabin that's dripping with epiphanies. Translucence in the dark. Voice notes from the beyond. Think: that thick forest mist and oblique static-filled short film segments.

To be reductive (and let's be honest, these bits are also an excuse to recommend some more music to explore if you're already into Perverts), this record has Grouper's droney film-grain, a super slow-mo Jenny Hval, and a little glimmer of Gia Margaret but with far more of that disassociating feeling when you're about to faint. It's so much more than most woozy or ambient pieces with some found sounds amongst the static.

Perverts has less in common with most music (least of all Ethel Cain's Lana-ish Preacher's Daughter) and much more of a shared hinterland with that unsettling but often transcendent sensation you get from arthouse films or art installations.

I could go on and on trying to put into words why I was so moved by this masterpiece but instead I'll share a small bit from this brilliant essay by Xixi over on Polyester:

Rather than engaging, people are content to either shitpost about how scary it is, or use it as an excuse to dunk on people for being fake fans. As with most things in 2025 - the discussion around Perverts seems to revolve around everything but the music itself. Our collective inability to sincerely engage with art beyond a thick veneer of ironic detachment is a troubling sign of the times. The election of Trump cemented the harsh truth that Gen Z is simply becoming more conservative, and this is being reflected in attitudes towards art. People do not wish to be challenged or confronted by art - and any art that does so is written off as ‘bad’, ‘cringe’, ‘weird’ etc. Even ostensibly socially liberal circles have become increasingly puritanical - art condemned as “problematic” is doomed to exile and ostracisation rather than critique and interrogation. Revered as it is, I doubt John Waters could have released Pink Flamingos (1972) today.

As the violence of wealth inequality becomes increasingly undeniable, capitalism has ramped up the overwhelming flurry of content we are constantly bombarded with at such an alarming rate that this kind of shallow engagement with art is more than understandable. We are faced with so much information that no one has the time to properly process it anymore...

📝 Read the full piece and support the work of Polyester.

FOUR NEW DISCOVERIES

In January, I hopped on the Eurostar and went to ESNS (aka Eurosonic) in Groningen. It's the first music industry conference of the year, known as the place where Europe's festival bookers go to discover acts to book for the summer in venues across the dutch college town. I spoke on two conference panels and watched music from 6pm until 2am for three nights in a row.

I've been writing a longer essay inspired by the trip, but for now, these were my four favourite discoveries:

THE CLIFFORDS

A remarkable band with a fairly unremarkable name. Whilst most of Ireland's recent exports have been clever-clever indie-rock lads, Cork's much talked up new band are something a little bit special. Think the big Springsteen bits of Kings of Leon and wide-screen roadtrip anthems which crescendo two more times than you expect. Unreleased track 'My Favourite Monster' (live version here) hints that the band have one of the albums of the year up its sleeve. Also, who doesn't love a rock band with a trumpet?

WOOMB

It's always a little surprising to get home from a festival and listen to recordings by a band you saw in silhouette late at night, making the sort of brooding psychedelic rock your mum warned you about. The kind of rock that leaves swirling long after they've finished twanging and shifting time signatures. The sort of rock that has you thinking about Massive Attack when there are lulls and The Stooges or The Kills when it swarms. And yet, you get home and press play and yes some of that euphoric magic is there but there's also other tracks, which are these lush, delicate, Cigarettes After Sex-ish, slightly haunted, slowcore gems.

They're the only band from Bulgaria to have played ESNS, and my verdict is: I really need to get myself to Sofia to see what else is happening over there.

MARATHON

There were some incredible punk bands at ESNS but none were quite like Amsterdam's Marathon. Part Fugazi-loving early 2000s post hardcore, part all-consuming festival headlining indie-rock behemoths, this band were not messing around. Riffs, riffs and more intense riffs, but so much detail burrowed in the glorious noise.

MAELLA

It's not everyday that you see someone who was almost the Czech Republic's Eurovision entry who has also worked with Steven from Blood Red Shoes. Maella's brand of lithe alt-pop feels like what Sky Ferreira would be doing if she hadn’t spent a decade in major label purgatory.

Whenever anyone asks where I was when I heard David Lynch died., the answer is simple: watching a fellow fan share the news, and play the perfect tribute at the legendary Vera venue in Groningen.

TWO SONGS STUCK ON REPEAT

'DAMAGE' by Lights: I always love pop songs that sound like early 2000 emo songs - with big bah-bah!-bahhhh singalongs, a cocktail of counter melodies and power ballad endings - that have had a serious makeover and been pulled into the future on a bed of synths.

There’s something about the phrasing and structure of this banger that has me looking for hair straighteners and wondering whether lines about proof of life photos is a new kind of intimacy. Guess I need to listen for a 36th time just to be sure this song is as good as I think it is.

“I’m heading down a rabbit hole,
does anyone want anything?”

'Vegas Venetian' by Mollie Elizabeth: A tune that feels like it’s being excavated from a suburban indie romcom and doused in Southern Comfort. Thought this would have had a million views by now, we must have stumbled upon a star waiting in the wings.

A Must Read

The Prince Charles, beloved of Quentin Tarantino, has its roots in London’s long tradition of freaky cinema. It should certainly be what they call an “asset of community value”, being the only place in London where you can catch a mainstream movie you missed, or take your child to see Home Alone as part of its sell-out December season, a staple of Christmas for people who cannot afford The Nutcracker.

At the end of January, the company that owns the cinema’s freehold – run by the 58-year-old billionaire Asif Aziz, once the subject of a Times piece that asked if he was “the meanest landlord in Britain” – demanded a six-month break clause in the lease, which could leave the cinema homeless. On 7 February, the world’s first YMCA – on nearby Great Russell Street – also bought by Aziz, was closed after a desperate attempt by locals to save it. The Prince Charles Cinema started a petition in response to the threat to its future, which received 150,000 signatures in 24 hours

📝 The Prince Charles Cinema and the death of the West End - No city has as flagrant a disregard for its own culture as London.

Poll: DiS Community Album of January

1st Mogwai - The Bad Fire
2nd Ela Minus - DIA
3rd Ethel Cain - Perverts
4th MIKE - Showbiz!
5th jasmine.4.t - You Are The Morning
6th Lambrini Girls - Who Let The Dogs Out
7th Anna B Savage - You & i are Earth
8th Bad Bunny - Debí Tirar Más Fotos
9th Ditz - Never Exhale
9th FKA Twigs - EUSEXUA

🧵 Read the full thread and sign up to the community to take part in next month's poll.

OUTRO SONG

A little throwback: Solange performing 'Losing You' at Sydney Opera House:

CONTENTS