It could easily be a late night cult cable series, but it’s KVELERTAK’s third full-length album, Nattesferd [Roadrunner Records]. Unpredictability threads together the record’s nine songs, and it also remains the band’s calling card. This mastery of the musically unexpected has cemented the Norwegian sextet—Erlend Hjelvik [vocals], Bjarte Lund Rolland [guitar], Vidar Landa [guitar, piano], Maciek Ofstad [guitar, vocals], Marvin Nygaard [bass], and Kjetil Gjermundrød [drums]—as one of heavy music’s most celebrated acts.

Rolling Stone pegged their last offering, Meir, at #2 on its “20 Best Metal Albums of 2013” and named Nattesferd among the “25 Most Anticipated Metal Albums of 2016.” Pitchfork, Spin, The Quietus, Decibel, BBC Music, and more have sung their praises. While opening a sold out Foo Fighters show in Norway, rock legend Dave Grohl presented the band with their first Norwegian gold plaque in recognition of 2011’s self-titled debut. Turning Metallica into vocal fans, they’ve toured with everybody from Slayer and Mastodon to Gojira and Anthrax, building a diehard fan base along the way. However, Nattesferd sees the musicians raging at full blast and progressing once again.

“We wrote more as a group,” says Bjarte. “Everyone brought something to the table and we approached it more as band than ever—both with the material and performances.”

“There was a lot more experimentation this time,” agrees Erlend. “On the last two albums, Bjarte did most of the songwriting. Now, it felt like the whole band was more involved. It was something we wanted to do. We were supposed to do that on the last record, but we didn’t have much time. This writing process was more relaxed and free. It’s organic and natural. For the first time, we really focused on achieving what we sound like on stage in the studio. So, we recorded live. We want it to be unpredictable.”

Coming off the road after a marathon of touring behind Meir in 2015, the boys hunkered down in their rehearsal spot to write. By early 2016, they entered Amper Tone Studio in Oslo with producer Nick Terry [The Libertines, Turbonegro]. The six-piece emerged with their most explosive salvos yet (all screamed in their native tongue, of course!)

“We actually recorded the base tracks with drums, bass, and three guitars all at once,” Bjarte goes on. “It felt liberating. We recorded for three weeks, and Nick mixed and mastered it at his studio.”

The first single “1985” begins with a bombastic, brash, and ballsy arena-ready riff before spinning out into Erlend’s inimitable roar and a sweeping refrain. “When I first heard the song, I got that instant eighties feeling,” the frontman explains. “It’s a dystopian lyric. I think technology was pretty perfect in 1985, so we should’ve just stayed there. That’s basically it!”

Meanwhile, “Ondskapens Galakse” simmers with an ominous intro, haunting bridge, and captivating chorus. “It’s more of an H.P. Lovecraft-ian lyric,” he goes on. “It’s about awakening the ancient ones and waiting for a galaxy of evil. I think digging into mythology, literature, and folklore makes for good lyrical material. That’s what I’m interested in when I’m trying to write lyrics. It’s probably from listening to way too much black metal and heavy metal!”

“Berserkr” sees a punk wail crash headfirst on an unshakable metallic groove with what might be the most badass lyrics ever. “It’s about how in the Viking age, they had these warriors who would just get fucked up on ‘shrooms and kill Christians,” Erlend remarks.

The title Nattesferd specifically translates to “Night Journey,” and it’s completely apropos for this nocturnal rock ‘n’ roll romp. “I thought it was pretty descriptive of all the songs together,” the singer states. “The whole record is a journey, and the lyrics are pretty dark, so it works out well. Also, it reminds me of Fly By Night—the best Rush album!”

Ultimately, Nattesferd offers an escape. “It’s a release,” Erlend leaves off. “I hope the audience feels the same way we do when we’re playing a live show. I’d like whatever shit you’re thinking about to disappear

Their debut album 'Lily Of The Valley' has been produced by Stephen Street, best known for his work with Blur and The Smiths. Just released by leading Irish independent label Model Citizen, the album is a spellbinding showcase of shadows and light.

Following a brace of well received limited edition EP's, the final band line up of Brian James, Mik McKeogh, Greg McCarthy and Dar Grant released their debut single 'Colour Fade' on London based Friends Vs. Records in 2011. Along with the follow up 'Health', the song enjoyed support from Zane Lowe, Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens. Following support slots with Franz Ferdinand, Passion Pit, The Macabees and Local Natives, the band played SXSW, The Great Escape and Leeds / Reading in 2011, before signing with Model Citizen.

With three successful UK tours this year, 'Lily Of The Valley' has been warmly greeted by fans and critics alike. Recent single 'All Those Friendly People' with its stunning video, is well on the way to one million views on YouTube. Current single 'Hands Down' has a thrilling sequel clip and can be picked up on very scarce Spanish 7” vinyl import. Radio support for the band continues to flourish at BBC Radio 1, XFM, BBC 6 Music, Q Radio, Absolute Radio and Amazing Radio.

Praise for 'Lily Of The Valley'...

“A vibrant, creative debut” **** - Lauren Murphy, The Irish Times

“The world should sit up and take notice now” **** - James Hendicott, Sunday Business Post (IE)

“Hugely impressive” - Hot Press (IE)

“A pioneering sound that’s bound to influence and inspire” - Rahilla Zafar, Huffington Post

“A band with talent well beyond their years” 9/10 - Gareth O’Malley, Shout4Music (UK)

“It sounds, as you would imagine, magnificent.... There’s enough here to suggest that their career might yet be an interesting one. Or a successful one. Or even, god forbid, both”. - Dara Higgins, Thumped.com (IE)

“A huge sounding album with plenty of heart, as well as the psychology, ingenuity, power and maturity to make it a future classic”. 4.5 out of 5. Francois Botha, Rhythm Circus (UK)

“Their debut album offers something of a refreshing, ambitious and frighteningly expansive platform from which they will no doubt springboard in 2012” - **** Jonathan Whitelaw, Is This Music? (UK)

“The album is truly impressive and impossible to leave without at least one more swim within its warm beauty and darkened depths” - Ringmaster Review Blog

“a considerably accomplished debut record” - 7/10 Saam Das, Faded Glamour (UK)

“As far as polished sounding debuts go, you won’t find many better out there so far in 2012”. - 7/10 Lewis Parker, Exposed (UK)

“A surefooted debut” - 7/10 Will Salmon, Clash Music (UK)

“This debut is a delight, and Funeral Suits clearly have potential in the bucket-loads.” - 7/10 El Hunt, This Is Fake DIY (UK)

“Outrageously good. Highly recommended” **** - Will Howard, AAA Music (UK)

“Close to being a classic” - Johnny Rimmer, Stereoboard (UK)

‘Lily Of The Valley’ is a rousing debut’ *** - Mike Doherty, The Fly (UK)

“Stephen Street’s production gives the band the oomph required to pull off the epic sound they’re striving for. A surefooted debut” - Will Salmon, Clash (UK)

“In the end, it’s pretty much brilliant. Fabulous” - Sam Saunders, Never Enough Noise


And it wasn’t when he and a girl were on the corner of Grand and Mercer in 
New York City as the sun was sliding down between the buildings and she 
told him something that would change their lives and months later they would 
be married—and then it wasn’t later that year when he wasn’t married to anyone. 
 


But by then Gambles was close. Except it wouldn’t be easy. It would
 take one more year of smoke, a year of telling everyone he’d made a 
record when he knew he wasn’t in any shape to make anything. And then he found himself a shack on a beach in Costa Rica with a girl he’d just met and a tropical storm hammering the windows and a guitar he probably couldn’t remember picking up, and he was lost in the song and the moment and suddenly she stopped him—and asked him to play that again. That—he says now—was the moment when Gambles was born.


“All my favorite music sends me somewhere new,” he says. “I wanted 
to make music like that. I didn’t know how but I knew I could know 
how. It was like a pat on the shoulder when I was doing so miserably all those 
years, when I’d fail… it’d be like, ‘Not right now. But you will.’”
 He came home from the tropics to New York City in the fall of 2012. While drinking with his best friend—who happened to make records in a
home studio called the Rare Book Room—he invited him downstairs where
he sat on the couch too drunk to think too much and took one single 
take to pour a song never written down on paper into a microphone.

That was “Trust,” the first song he would post on his tumblr and the same song that Pitchfork somehow found only a few weeks later and presented to the world. Maybe Pitchfork felt like he felt when he was sitting there, listening to his voice and his guitar and that year of confusion and loss spill out into the room: “What did I just do?”
 What he did was let go—or open up—or fall to pieces—or whatever
 happens when you stop trying to be someone and start breathing. When
 he booked another recording session at the Rare Book Room with proper
 rehearsal and prep and techniques, it failed terrifically. But he 
still had songs he needed to get out, so he tried again on the same
 couch at the same level of drunken fearlessness. And that’s what did 
it. Across the winter of 2012 and the spring of 2013, he sang through songs 
born only in the most unpredictable unguarded moments—lonesome 
late nights or long nowhere drives while touring with The Maccabees, or 
between sound checks when his erstwhile soundman had to scramble to 
record them before the inspiration disappeared.
 
In a song like “Animal,” he makes new promises to new discoveries:
“Follow me / between these words where we can be.” And in the 
songs that would become his debut EP Far From Your Arms and first 
full-length Trust—songs like “California” and “So I Cry Out,” sculpted
 through sudden recording sessions and break-of-dawn moments that
 happened the day before the album was supposed to be done—he’d take
 all the stories that made him into Gambles and bring them to wild 
honest life with nothing but his guitar, his voice and every memory he 
needed to keep. There is a darkness in these songs, just like the time that 
birthed them: “There’s no safe side,” he sings. “Wherever I stand, I damage.”
But in the same way, there’s light and a new beginning waiting. That 
long night in Costa Rica was when Gambles was born. And now with the 
release of his EP and LP on his own GMBLS imprint through Secretly 
Canadian, it’s become the day when Gambles wakes up. 



Musically there are few artists who share their understanding, scope and ambition and fewer as prolific and focused. The emotionally direct debut single ‘Only Time Will Tell’, released on Jen Long's Kissability label pronounced the band as the new and exciting London artists of 2013 and immediately cemented them as a must see.

The accompanying video showed them building and ritualistically burning a monumental construction of their now synonymous logo, and showcased the trio's aesthetic ambitions whilst subtly shining a light on their constant need to offer themselves and carve their own path into the musical landscape.

At the core of G L I T C H E S are their regular ‘H A C Y O N N I G H T S’ a series of underground parties accommodated within the heights of G L I T CH E S HQ. Sandwiched between an Algerian Cabal and East End Whores this hub of creativity and vice of the musically and socially inquisitive, provides a through the keyhole insight to how the trio work and live whilst boldly offering up some of London’s most exciting new and established talent, such as We Were Evergreen, Beaty Heart, NZCA/Lines, and We Have Band. It's chaos (within reason).

Johnny first appeared on the scene in 2006 playing in numerous bands and running club nights, but ears were pricked by his first album A Larum, released in 2008.

A widened palette followed with his sophomore album Been Listening along with global touring. Songs such as Lost and Found and The Water (a duet with old friend Laura Marling) cemented his lyrical reputation, and prompted further collaborations with the likes of Anna Calvi, Barbarossa and subsequent production work with Marika Hackman, showcasing his desire to nurture and collaborate with varied and exciting new talent.

Following the album and a stint writing, producing and performing the soundtrack to indie film A Bag of Hammers, Johnny returned to the boards, appearing in Richard Bean’s The Heretic at the Royal Court, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem alongside Mark Rylance, Richard III and Twelfth Night at The Globe and West End with Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance, before taking the lead in The Low Road by Bruce Norris back at The Royal Court.

Flynn supported the release of his third album, Country Mile, with extensive touring throughout the US and Europe, including a tour in the USA with friends Mumford & Sons, sold out shows across the UK and Europe and a follow up solo tour in the US and Canada, which gave us the Live in Washington DC album. His thespian tendencies have not been neglected either, with a lead in Song One alongside Anne Hathaway released January 2015, and a role in Oliver Assayas' Sils Maria with Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Moretz.

The choice of 'Sillion' as a title for his fourth album was one Flynn reached through a convergence of unlikely forces — of friendship, politics, poetry but it’s a word too that captures much of the album’s colour and mood — its measure of the times.

The word rose up to meet him some time last autumn, post-Brexit, just as America was in the throes of election fever, and the world seemed suddenly upturned. “I had this really visceral, physical sense of needing to go to ground,” Flynn recalls. "And I had a strong sense that the album title had to be earthy and muddy,” Flynn says.

Much of the recording of Sillion was done while Flynn was starring in Martin McDonagh’s play Hangmen. “I was playing a psychopath,” he explains, “so there’s probably some of that darkness in the lyrics, and a celebration that you can explore the baseness of human nature.”

This darkness rises up particularly on the track In the Deepest, which grew out of a film score commission and which Flynn describes as being about “a sense of foreboding … it has such a sense of maleficent drama to it.”

One of the album’s earliest songs is Jefferson’s Torch, when Flynn found himself “trying to write something political.” This was long before Brexit, long before Trump. “But I was reading about lighting the torch for all mankind and about revolution happening every two generations,” he recalls.

For all of Sillion’s political grounding, it is an album of great intimacy too. The opening track, Raising the Dead, tells of Flynn getting to know his new-born daughter.

Heart Sunk allowed Flynn to try out a Voice-o-Graph — the recording booth popular in the 1940s which gave people two flat minutes to make a record. “There’s only two working in the world and there was one in London for a time and I had a chance to have a go in it and that wavy, crackly recording on this song is the recording I made. It sounds like the old Blues records I love. I wanted a sense of time travel in the song, panning from the Voice-o-Graph to the studio recording — at one point there’s one in each ear.”

He found inspiration also, he says, in Jez Butterworth’s play The River. “I’ve always been obsessed with the mysterious experiences you have alone in nature. I grew up by a river and my Dad and I would go poaching”

And the figure of Robert Macfarlane appears once again for Tarp in the Prop. Macfarlane and Flynn had been invited to take part in a series of conversations between writers and musicians at St Andrew’s University.

This is, by some measure, an unusual album. But it is run through with great love and great passion for nature and humour and mankind, for all the silly and base and wonderful things we do. As Flynn put it, describing that same word, Sillion, “it’s about the sacredness of man’s endeavour to connect with the earth while in separation from the earth."

Apar is Delorean’s follow up to 2010’s Subiza which brought the band world-wide critical acclaim.  The New York Times said, “Delorean traffics in airy atmospherics and enveloping rhythm:  ideally, music for a dance floor in the hours preceding dawn” and Filter described the debut as “a compelling balance between Spanish discotheque, indie rock knowhow, and sparkling synth arrangements…eight tracks of blissful synth-pop about the emotional extremes of love.”

Delorean started the band as teenagers in the Basque Country town of Zarautz, informed by a love of hi-hat-frenzied dance music, then moved to Barcelona, where they fully embraced carefree Mediterranean club music on their celebrated 2010 LP, Subiza. After touring heavily in support of Subiza the band returned home and began work on Apar. Delorean strove to embrace a more sophisticated relationship to sound recording and songwriting in order to push the stories and dynamics of this album to a deeper more complex place.  Leaving behind the ornate and layered production of Subiza, the chopped up female vocal samples have been replaced by actual singers and the bare minimum of instrumentation is all that remains to support them.  Lead singer, lyricist and bassist Ekhi Lopetegi calls Apar simply their "big production album." But through his articulate lens, the record’s emotional undercurrent, and the band's mastery of luxurious, coast-of-Spain beats, Apar is something altogether more illuminating. 

The album’s poignant cover art unites the universal breakup story of Apar—the title, a Basque term referring to froth—and the album's refined analog production. Inspired by graveyard crosses built by the Basque artist Jorge Oteiza, it depicts two wooden crosses, connected together as if grasping arms in an unconditional embrace, that have been thrown into the sea of Cap the Creus, a Northern Spanish region known for its hard wind and dangerous crags. Yet the crosses—though their very form symbolizes death—hold on to each other.  “Death shall have no dominion,” as Lopetegi sings on "Dominion," quoting the poet Dylan Thomas. They're afloat for now, connected now, real, ever on the move. Amid turbulence that is reflected in the band's lyrics, ranging from heartbreak to Spain's ongoing financial crisis, Delorean has bonded tight too, and with Apar the band has made the most powerful, dynamic, and moving album of its career.

Coasts are currently in the studio with producer Eliot James (Two Door Cinema Club, Noah & The Whale) recording their debut album due for release this summer. Before then, the band are set to release a new single from the album at the end of March titled ‘A Rush of Blood’ supported by another UK and European tour for what will inevitably be their last until they tour the album this Autumn.

"Who wants to regain his youth, has only to resume his folly," wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Juveniles has lost neither the first nor the second never stopped. And if you still need to hear that boys will be boys, both French, they, certainly will not see the same thing in the eye: since their debut on the Parisian label Kitsuné pioneer until the arrival of their first album this year, Jean-Sylvain Le Gouic and Thibaut Doray have drawn their youth shield against boredom, and rollers choruses bulwark against attacks forced into adulthood, formidable, feared pass.

We Are Young proclaimed they casually on their first single released in 2011. The three words, like the name of the group, had nothing trivial: more than a simple formula that slap, the title stood out as a mantra, a declaration of war a brazen duo ready to take up arms to defend the last bastion of adolescence. But what unsheathe big guns and sharp knives when you have to act much more subtle and sharp argument? Utopian and carnal pop that eternal dream and plays endlessly with fire. The bubbling Rennes, HQ of the two boys, We Are Young crosses in France to cross borders to punctuate the sleepless nights a stateless youth who could not care less of the nationality principle and refuses to sleep quietly by fear of never waking up. Juveniles in, we took fatal electro-pop in the first language option applied eighties - needless to say that the degree is high hand wins with honors.

If looking towards Manchester Smiths and New Order, it is on French soil as though the duo launched its first live attacks. An explosive move to Rennes Transmusicales lights the fuse. The festival Inrockuptibles 2012, which devotes its one the same year, fanning the embers. Juveniles shows himself wild, a baffling efficiency, but both surrounded by English Hot Chip with whom they share a donation to shake hips and calves unabated. Because this is where the strength of the group: a mastery of live allowing them all extravagances, an unstoppable intensity and whole energy used to grip the public, never letting go until the leave haggard, brain fusion and exhausted legs. From fiery wisp, the duo then joined a pop blaze that has one thing in mind: to raise the fire cheeks of young people to the pure ideals and reckless insolence.

And who better than Yuksek two Britons could they get to support them in their business of conquering dancefloors and broken hearts? With his second album Living on the Edge of Time, the one we knew virtuoso relentless electro showed he also mastered the language of pop fingertips - a vein for the duo itself bilingual, that s is eager to spin the studio to record Reims part of his first album. "We had the opportunity to meet before Yuksek and the current is very well. I think we have a pretty similar temperament and it helped us a lot to spend those months locked together. We learned a lot with him, to do more with fewer elements, not to fall into the same in each piece, "says Jean-Sylvain whose voice dandy crooner knows how to be as elegant qu'éthérée throughout Juveniles.

Do more without overdoing it: that's what the duo managed to accomplish on this album where we find both the idealism of the early pop group, his penchant for eighties synths and beats that fatal would not deny their smart producer. More than a collection of bombs to blow pop clubs (Void) Juveniles meets especially twelve tracks all statements of a youth that can pass in a fraction of a second, the total bliss (We Are Young) to more deepest spleens (Washed Away). But rather than drowning in melancholy, the boys prefer tame by making dance (All I Ever Wanted) and counteract the sadness sensuality (Elisa Adriatic), which is the way all eccentricities as the very disco Fantasy. We see the shadow of Smiths hover over Weekend At Mine, on the Blood Orange Summer Night, and the Phoenix on the hymn Strangers proves that Juveniles may be born on the wrong side of the Channel, they do nevertheless remain a full member of a family of French pop musicians who speak fluently without the slightest accent.