Your Soundtrack To Summer's End Credits

August's (somewhat melancholic) music recommendations are here.

Sad boi summer, Brat summer, and prematurely demure Autumn, all seems to have merged into grey skies and sleepless humid nights.

Soundtracking the last few weeks of supermoons, asteroid showers and oncoming headlights for me have been a enticing pile of new releases from old favourites and a new artist to discover with a future-gazin' synth soup.

If this is your first of our monthly music recommendations newsletters, hello! It's a quick read, filled with things to hear, an album of the month, a track of the month, links to bits to read, and a few diversions. There's a playlist and some podcasts at the end. Hopefully you'll find some new paths to wander off on.

In The Headlines

• The return of Rock Against Racism (NME)
• 60 UK Festivals Cancelled or Postponed - AIF calls for Govt Action (Access All Areas)
• Taylor Swift played to almost 1.2 million people in the UK, generating an estimated £1bn to the economy (BBC)
• Adele performed for 10 nights at a "pop up arena" in Hamburg (IQ)
• 13% of grassroots music venues that closed in 2023 were in Yorkshire, new data shows. A survey has found that there are just 835 music venues left in the UK, as public interest and concern over their future starts to grow. (NowThen)
• This summer has seen Taylor Swift, the Foo Fighters and Pink all performing in stadiums in Scotland. A £1 levy on those gigs alone would have raised £300k to support local venues and grassroots artists. (Scottish Greens)

ALBUM OF THE MONTH

Forgive Too Slow
by JULIA-SOPHIE

Julia-Sophie (pictured, above) does everything I love about headphone music.

There's warm waves of synths beneath half-whispered half-sung verses that occasionally give way to moreish chorus refrains.

This is woozy euphoria. It's soft-edged, bedroom electronica, with sunset dappled dust. At times, especially when the bass rumbles in on 'numb', it's as if Underworld are hiding under a pillow fort.

Forgive Too Slow is one of those special records that don't come around too often. Uncomfortably vulnerable oscillates to welcoming and quietly confident. It has patience and an English charm. There's also a film grain texture to everything, which makes it feel as if it's from the same cinematic universe as Broadcast and Radio Dept. There's also a tenderness and humanity that drum machine world filled with flickering lights rarely manages to conjure. It's the sort of record that you instantly want to share with someone after hearing it - even just to let someone else hear the line "sharing chips on the way home."

forgive too slow, by Julia-Sophie

10 track album

Julia-SophieRob Smith

AUGUST PLAYLIST REFRESH

I add new releases to the DiS Favourites playlist on Spotify every few weeks. However, following Joe Rogan's recent outbursts about the UK race riots, alongside a lack of hope of music streaming royalty reform, I'm increasingly sure Spotify is really not the place to be but - somewhat annoyingly - it's one of the easiest places to compile and share a playlist. And it still benefits the acts included to get a bit of algo-juice to help them reach audiences outside of the playlist itself. Thoughts welcomed on where to move to but I think next month I'll try doing a YouTube playlist again (I know they're not much better!).

Recent playlist additions include the Sparks-y majesty of the deservedly mega-hyped Chapelle Roan, a devilish dark-electro remix of Chelsea Wolfe by Crosses (yeah, Chino from Deftones side-project!), a goth summer anthem from Heartworms, and a big breezy one from Yannis from Foals plus new music from Justice x Tame Impala, Karen O x Danger Mouse, Laura Marling, Nick Cave, Portishead's Beth Gibbons, Public Service Broadcasting, Efterklang, Los Campesinos, and lots more.

SONG OF THE MOMENT

'Hardwired'
by GEMMA HAYES

"What you gonna do about it? What are you gonna say?" ponders Gemma Hayes, in the song I have had stuck on repeat for weeks. To be reductive af, it's a track that hangs in the air like Cat Power atop a Boxer-era The National storm cloud.

'Hardwired' is full of space to let out the inner growl about our brains being trapped in the amber of the doom scroll. This song's lush go-on-touch-some-grass open space gets flooded with the claustrophobic rock jangle of a snarling low-slung bass and a lone tambourine before a big sky moment of release. At one point you're pulled by one hand into the sky by a Grandaddy-ish synth flourish.

Everything about this howl-and-stomp-a-long song speaks unexpectedly to this moment of far-right uprisings, anti-fascist pushbacks, and the digital depression of our disintegrating sense of self... whilst also feeling like an unexpected summer anthem!

The lauded Irish songwriter says:

“I wanted to take a musical freeze frame of the world post-Covid. A place where, according to statistics, we were more captured by our devices and social media content than ever before.

We were sitting ducks for bad actors to misinform us in a way that felt like real information. A place where people became more polarised by whether they identified with left or right, pro or anti etc. The lack of nuance in these areas seemed dangerous. I felt like unplugging the world, waiting ten seconds, and plugging it back in again. And thus, was born Hardwired.”

Read a more in-depth interview about forthcoming album Blind Faith, here:

Gemma Hayes: ‘I’ve always struggled with confidence issues. As a teenager, I always had crazy panic attacks’

Returning after a long hiatus, the Tipperary singer-songwriter talks about her new album, anxiety and how she nearly sacrificed herself for her children

The Irish TimesNadine O’Regan

From the DiS / Beatcast archive, here's Gemma Hayes performing the incredible 'Shock to the System' back stage at The Great Escape in Brighton back in 2012 and her full live set.

Exit Through The Podcast

More episodes of the Drowned in Sound podcast are on their way (thank you to everyone who is supporting this newsletter, which allows me to carve out the time to do all of this - upgrade your account here) but here are two recommend pods to dive into:

New! Music Industry pod: The Money Trench

You may know the name Mark Sutherland from the music press or in more recent years from more music biz related reporting. He's a wonderful bloke and he's had some incredible guests on his newly released podcast including artist managers of acts ranging from Supergrass to Last Dinner Party, alongside heads of industry trade bodies, record label MDs, and the BBC's head of music, Lorna Clarke.
Listen here: themoneytrench.com

Tech, Politics, Culture pod: 404 Media

Not gonna lie, I've taken a huge amount of inspiration from what 404 Media are doing. They also use the Ghost platform which DiS is now published on. Whilst their focus is technology reporting, it's much more a lens to look at other topics. Their recent episode on AI deepfakes, Taylor Swift and how Trump could face serious criminal charges is a fascinating listen.

Also happy anniversary 404Media, who turned 1 today

What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media

In August 2023, we launched 404 Media with a novel idea: pay journalists to do journalism. Here we are, a year later.

404 MediaJoseph Cox

Thanks for reading to the end and stay tuned for our annual alternative to the Mercury prize, The Neptune Music Prize - you'll find the longlist on our forums in this thread.

Sean