“We’re confident and happy to be where we are as a band — everything that’s happened with us has exceeded expectations, and it’s all been a surprise, it’s all much bigger than what we were prepared for. So when we came to recording this record we had a choice: to shy away from that, or to realise that people dig what we’re doing, and make something robust, with that energy.”

It was December 2010, and Mumford and Sons had been on the road since the previous summer: a glorious, eventful, yet relentless time. Standing somewhere between exhilarated and exhausted, the plan now was for the band’s four members to spend a few weeks apart, write, recuperate, and then reconvene in Nashville in the New Year, with the intention of trying out material for their second album.

The informality of the set-up in Tennessee perhaps helped to dispel any nerves they may have had about following up 2009’s Sigh No More — an album that had gone four times platinum in the UK, and twice platinum in the US. The band assembled in the front room of a house and set about sharing the songs they had been working on alone. “It was a coming together, a sharing of some stuff,” explains Lovett (keys, accordion, drums), “a pool of ideas that would come out of our time apart. So if there was nervousness, it wasn’t nervousness about the record, it was nervousness about how a couple of these new song ideas would go down. But we knew we were going to play music, and it wasn’t time to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it was more like we were starting another year from this point. And that felt very good. Very fresh, and natural.”

Out of that time in Nashville came a couple of songs for the new record — the gorgeous Lovers’ Eyes and Hopeless Wanderer. Then followed more touring, performances at the Grammys and the Brits, before the chance came in the summer to head into a studio in Bermondsey, south London. Here the band recorded the title song for the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, as well as finding the footings for several of the new album’s songs: Babel, I Will Wait, Not With Haste, Broken Crown, Lover of the Light.

“And then,” recalls Marcus Mumford (lead vocals, guitar, drums), “we went down to a farm in Somerset and played the 10 song game, which is where you have to write 10 songs each in a set period of time without any criteria for quality.” The result of the 10 song game, the band recall with some amusement, was firstly that Ted Dwane (string bass, drums, guitar) has a natural propensity for writing murder ballads, and secondly a new album track named Reminder.

“It’s such a nice exercise because it removes your focus on perfection,” says Dwane. “You drop your guard down and you sort of bash about.” For Mumford, it also helped to re-focus to the material already amassed. “There were various points in the album where we felt maybe we needed to inject more directness, and maybe that’s what Reminder did,” he says. “There’s a bit more obscurity in this album and Reminder is a really emotionally identifiable song. I think I Will Wait Was the Same. And in terms of making the best record we could we felt like we needed those songs.”

‘The Weight Of Your Love’, Editors fourth studio album and the first to feature new members Justin Lockey and Elliott Williams is, according to lead singer and songwriter Tom Smith, ‘a band record, a musical record, a rock record with a foot in that alt-rock / americana world’. Inspired by Scott Litt’s work with REM amongst others and built around a live performance approach to recording, the album contains the most strident and direct Editors songs to date. With a lyrical fascination with love in all its myriad forms, ‘whether romantic or break-up or creepy or even stalkey love’ (Tom again) and recorded in Nashville at Blackbird Studio by producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, etc), ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ represents a new chapter for the band in more than one way.

Cast your mind back to the close of 2010. Editors had just finished another round of touring and promotion in support of their third album, 2009’s ‘In This Light And On This Evening’. Six years on from their multi-platinum debut ‘The Back Room’, the band had seen many of their contemporaries disappear from view whilst steadily building themselves into one of Europe’s biggest bands. That third album debuted at Number One in the UK charts as had its predecessor, ‘An End Has A Start’ and spawned a continent wide hit in the form of ‘Papillon’, a thunderous electro rock tune destined to force arms into the air at festivals across the continent and the first non-domestic single to debut at Number One in the Belgian singles charts where the band are arguably the biggest name in the rock world.

Never a band to stop, the four reconvened in London to begin work with producer Flood on the songs that Tom Smith had been developing during that campaign for the next album. And then, slowly but inextricably, the wheels came off. The first week in the studio was spent fixing broken equipment, three rehearsal sessions came and went with declining results and Editors found themselves sliding from the peak of achievement into a trough of doubt:

‘It dawns on you slowly, sickeningly, that it’s not good enough. For the three of us, for me and Russ and Ed it didn’t feel like the songs were in the right place and they weren’t what we wanted to do’ TOM SMITH

Editors had been together for over a decade, first as friends at college, then Snowfield and then as Editors. The bonds between the quartet transcended the success of the band and encompassed parents and friends intermingled over that decade, their early days camping on their manager’s floors and working in call centres to keep the band solvent through to international success and two members relocating to New York. It wasn’t easy but, ultimately, as Ed Lay says ‘we were still mates but our life in the band was based on our music’. Simply put, the realisation dawned that Tom, Russ and Ed wanted to take the band in a direction that Chris didn’t want to take, and that if the next step wasn’t taken there would be no more Editors records. Chris Urbanowicz, founding member and iconic guitarist was asked to leave the band.

As if losing a founder member, Tom likens it to ‘losing a limb’, wasn’t enough, Editors were booked to headline Belgium’s Werchter Festival three months from that moment, their biggest ever show to 85,000 people. You can possibly read the beginning of the ‘new’ Editors in what happened next.

‘My gut was to cancel it’ Tom states directly, conversely Ed went the other way; ‘It was a little bit of a leap of faith but I was confident we could make it work’. Which left Russ with the casting vote and he went with Ed. Werchter was on and the challenge from here was how it would happen. But whatever happened now, Editors would continue. For now, filling a field with sound was top priority.

Enter Justin Lockey. Former guitarist with Your Code Name Is:Milo, film maker, Krautrock enthusiast and described by Flood, who suggested him to the band, as ‘a positive personality’. One email later and he was coming to London for his first rehearsal, an experience that he found somewhat odd to say the least.

‘It was the weirdest thing I have ever done. I’ve never played anyone else’s song in full, I never had that culture of covering songs. But, it was quite liberating. I was more concerned about the fans than the band, people waiting for you to fuck it up’.

To make things even weirder, that first rehearsal was minus Tom, absent with tonsillitis but, for Ed, that may have had its benefits, the three choosing to have a go at a new song alongside the old favourites. ‘It was a weird situation but we clicked. We worked on ‘Sugar’ that first day and Justin immediately impressed me with his ideas’.

All three were conscious of the pressure on Justin and use the phrase ‘replacement Chris’ to jokingly refer to the situation he may have found himself in. Enter Elliott Williams, member of Airship and known to Tom, Ed and Russ through their shared management. Alongside taking the pressure off Justin, adding a second multi-instrumentalist made sense as Tom explains; ‘it was big shows and big stages and it felt right to have a more traditional rock set up, a more musical environment that didn’t rely on tapes and synths’. Now Editors were five and, following an intensive period of rehearsal, ready for Werchter.

No discussion of where Editors are now can underestimate the importance of that performance on June 30th 2012. All five regard it as a pivotal point for this album, Tom can only shake his head and say it was ‘something else’ whilst Justin says ‘I came offstage at Werchter and wanted to do more shows straight away’. In many ways, ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ was born alongside a new Editors that night. The big rock record was on, the band were set.

This new Editors were fizzing with ideas, the new members were not differentiated from the old, suggestions and parts came from all members from the off. Progress from here was swift and the new band found new ways to work, as Russ explains in relation to the new guys; ‘we looked for their suggestions, there was nothing guarded about it’, whilst Justin found the immediacy of the band bonding thrilling; ‘they pushed me to play in a way that I hadn’t done before, I learnt a lot from them and I think they really enjoyed the feeling of what it’s like to be in a band.’ This bonding increased with the choice of Jacquire King as producer and was cemented when he suggested recording at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, meaning the new Editors were destined to spend six weeks sharing a house and a daily studio commute in the early months of 2013. Those journeys were soundtracked by US rock radio, what Tom describes as ‘a lot of AC/DC and Van Halen but also The Stones and Beatles’, classic bands who made classic records totally in keeping with the vibe that was gradually playing out in the studio as ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ came together in an astonishingly short time.

The experiences of Nashville go beyond a radio soundtrack in terms of influence on the record. Russ believes that ‘the space really helped with everything. As soon as you get there you realise it’s a driving city and that feeling of space really seeped into the album’ ‘, for Ed, the communality of Editors existence changed his role in the band radically:

‘Everybody felt freer to speak their mind about parts. I didn’t feel that comfortable previously but recording this album I felt a fully-fledged contributing member of the band.’

The spirit of freeness and abandon flowed from the first take to the final wrap. Across the album are a series of ‘news’ for Editors. Tom’s falsetto on ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’ is his first, reclaiming a song he wrote following a challenge from his former A & R man to make a song for an X Factor contestant. He can’t help but smile as he explains how he came to keep it, ‘my A &R got fired, the X Factor singer got dropped and we decided to keep it. I think it’s one of the best things we’ve done’. Horns make an appearance on an Editors record for the first time, Elliott’s ‘amazing´ (the other four) singing voice gave Tom a melodic counterpoint, best displayed on ‘Formaldehyde’ whilst ‘The Phone Book’ suited just an acoustic guitar so that’s what it got. As Tom notes ‘I have a deep love of those big rock records that are straightforward and we really embraced that throughout’.

Even the problems were becoming positives. ‘Nothing’, a track that the band had debuted at their Birmingham fanclub shows pre Werchter had been earmarked as a potential single but recording it was proving tricky to say the least. ‘It sounded like a bad fight in an Irish Bar’, Russ deadpans of the waltz time track. A suggestion to tap up Clint Mansell, the Grammy award winning ‘Black Swan’ soundtrack man and, co-incidentally, native Brummie, was embraced with open arms in this sense of new possibilities and his reworking of the track into a stately centrepiece for the album once again reinforces the changes that have been wrought by this band in their approach to their music in the last year. As Ed notes, previously such a thing would have ‘been done reluctantly, we’d have been uncomfortable with it’ whereas now, for the band and in Russ’s words ‘the more I listen to it the more I get out of it, it’s a brave move and this record has been all about that’.

Which pretty much sums it up. A brave move, more a succession of brave moves, the kind of moves that bands increasingly find hard to make in modern times. Editors have become five but, more than that, they have rediscovered being a band. All the members continually refer to ‘The Weight Of Your Love’ as the product of a band, as a band record. For Tom Smith ‘it feels like we’re more sure of ourselves, more muscular. The record feels untouchable at times, I’m really quite surprised at what we’ve achieved.’. In the spirit of the new Editors, the democracy of old and new let’s leave the final word on the album to the new boys though: to Justin and Elliot, who uniquely can look within and without for the time being:

‘We have definitely bonded into a band, maybe more than we expected. Recording the album there were no egos around, all we wanted to do was help Tom deliver those songs.’

ELLIOTT WILLIAMS

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a band that is this excited about what they have done. You start thinking, what will come from this, the progression that is possible. They lost a member who was integral to their signature sound and they’ve come back twice as big. I can’t wait to get out and play it live. We want to take the face off everyone who is watching.’

JUSTIN LOCKEY

EDITORS ARE

Tom Smith – vocals, guitar, piano

Russell Leetch – bass, keyboards

Ed Lay – drums, percussion

Justin Lockey – guitars, keyboards, films

Elliott Williams – guitars, keyboards, vocals

Until her recent signing to Columbia Records, Lucy Rose had none of this, but her heart-stoppingly poignant songs and cracked porcelain voice saw her enter 2012 with YouTube hits, radio plays and crowds like nobody else out there. Such is her fan-base, she now sells out 500-capacity venues with ease, and at the tender age of 23, Lucy is being tipped by the great and the good as the one New British Artist who may stick around longer than any of the other fly-by-night contenders.

“Gentle, folky, confidential tone, undershot by a coolness of intelligence and self possession” 4/5 The Daily Telegraph

(Pop CD of the Week)

“A bewitching one-off talent” Daily Star

“Dark-hearted pop songs that strive for the epic” Q Magazine

“A resounding affirmation of a consummate talent” 4/5 Daily Mirror

“A beautiful voice” The Sun

“Miss Rose’s unassuming charm ticks off everything on the How To Make Your Fans Adore You checklist” 7/10 NME

“Each song is a confessional of her most tightly clasped secrets” The Fly

“One of the country’s most promising new voices” “Utterly beautiful” Sunday Times (Culture)

“It was only a matter of time before the second wave of British nu-folk pioneers made it to the U.S, and Lucy Rose is sure to be among its first breakout stars” Vogue.com

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For every sublime, a ridiculous. In the wake of his self-titled debut, James was invited to join a choir including Antony Hegarty, Laurie Anderson and Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt to sing behind Lou Reed at Carnegie Hall for an emotional finale at a Free Tibet benefit, curated by Philip Glass. ‘The reason I still can’t play in mainland China,’ he notes. It was an experience only marred by the toke of a joint handed him from one of the cleverly obnoxious Brooklyn hip-hop trio, Das Racist, before stepping onstage. ‘There I am, my gangly 6’6” self, poking out the back of this ridiculously well-appointed choir and I’m like just feeling so awkward. And paranoid, of course. It was a bit like being in Dad’s Army.’

During the making of The Colour in Anything, James has found himself in other rarefied circles. There have emerged amid the undeniable global musical elite new friends, allies and admirers attracted to his bespoke musical mood, his certainty with sound. His influence has proved legion. There is barely a boy in his bedroom making beats that is not in thrall to some of Blake’s methodology and sound. At the upper musical tier, his music has proven irresistible to the international r&b community who came courting for collaboration.

There was the meeting with Kanye West in Hollywood’s Hidden Hills, for which Blake, not West arrived two hours late (‘they were perhaps a bit too Hidden?’). The LA playback for a new Beyonce record, with the artist’s daughter singing along in approval to a vocal hook of James’ composition (‘Beyonce said “that’s how you know it’s catchy”). There were the hours he poured into sessions for Frank Ocean’s forthcoming opus (‘absolutely the biggest influence on this record’). And the Transatlantic passing back and forth of alchemical music files with his good friend (‘the closest I have to a brother’) Justin Vernon, Bon Iver, which forms The Colour in Anything’s arresting, surprising, rousing, beautifully semi-intelligible centrepiece I Need a Forest Fire (‘even I don’t know what some of the lyrics are’). There were sessions in Rick Rubin’s Zen Malibu retreat, Shangri-La, where James watched with sanguine calm as Rubin spliced together his hours of improvisation, lying on the floor, scratching his beard.

‘It’s gone by in such a flurry that I didn’t sometimes stop to appreciate what was happening to me,’ James says now, looking back on the surreal moments that have punctuated his brilliant musical life. ‘I’ve been around some of the most unbelievable writers and musicians, choreographers and composers. Only now do I feel like I’ve had some of the blindfold taken off me where I can see what actually happened.’ James is a prodigious, gifted musician whose area of speciality – that flirtation point at which club music goes in for the clinch with Classical – has yet to be bound by genre.

The night at The Prince of Wales brought James back down to earth from his wandering musical star. ‘Big sound system in an old room? Boom. It was great.’ They proved cathartic on two counts. Firstly, he was getting toward the disquieting closing stages of finishing a record. It had a title, The Colour in Anything.

The construction of the record, mostly conjured in his South London bedroom studio, was clouded by early ravaging waves of self-doubt. ‘The album is, I guess, about my growth as a person,’ he says. ‘When you come back from a tour, you feel like you no longer have a purpose. There was a period of quite a lot of confusion as to what the fuck my role was. A lot of the stuff I wrote at that point I didn’t use. It wasn’t like happy mistakes. It was more that I really didn’t know what people want. Or I don’t know what I want.’ The Mercury Music Prize for Overgrown which sits on his mantelpiece was a temporary cause for celebration, but sounds like it further exacerbated some initial third album neurosis. ‘I knew there was expectation.’

Then there was the central issue of James himself. Someone told James that the problem with being in the public eye is that you become frozen in time at the moment you step into it. This triggered a further quiet crisis of confidence. Had the touring, the recording, the being at the centre of a creative and commercial process just been about arrested development, after all? The title track alludes directly to this. It is about approaching becoming a man, accepting responsibilities. ‘All I wanted to do was carry you for aching,’ he sings, ‘all I wanted was to mend things that were breaking.’ This is his most personal missive yet, as close to the piano man tradition as he has veered. ‘I struggle to find the colour in anything’ is a heartbreakingly transparent evocation of the blackness of male failure.

The silver lining at the end of a period of rabid self-assessment was the most redemptive of them all: love. ‘I met somebody in the last two years really who completely turned my attitude and general outlook around and essentially made me grow up very fast in a way I hadn’t been made to before.’

James was brought up an only child in Enfield, North London. ‘It’s a solar system in which you are the sun.’ He says he has been useless in relationships before. ‘Very selfish. And allowed to be selfish.’ A new girlfriend began to challenge him to look harder and deeper at his life, to pull him up on failings, to correct himself. ‘In order to keep the person you want to be with, there were a lot of things about me I had to change. I met somebody who I very much appreciate for walking in at that point. Because my life was in a very untended state.’

As the album began to take shape, James Blake found himself asking hard questions of himself, in the company of someone who allowed him to do it. A record of self-reflection, that bridged his interior and exterior lives, about the communication difficulties shared between two people, sorting yourself out, learning to love and about simply growing up took arresting musical shape. The recurrent themes of miscommunication are set out transparently on the poignant album opener, Radio Silence, then further developed on the unlikely jolt of Put That Away and Talk To Me, I Hope My Life and Noise Above Our Heads.

The second byproduct of the Brixton night with 1-800 Dinosaur was more generational, tying to an emerging strain of maleness James directly connects to. A sweating night in a little pub, with banging music across the dysmorphic spectrum of a dance music gradation system in eclectic 21st century free-fall, confirmed to James something he has suspected for a long time among musicians of his ilk. That those experimenting at the outer edges of sound, on that magical hinterland between electronic experimentation and classical composition, have a subdued, sometimes melancholy overtone to their music on account of having missed the joyous mysteries of acid house.

‘As much as that sounds like a joke, I think it’s true,’ he says. ‘I’m gutted I missed hardcore and raves in Epping Forest or around the M25. Travelling sound-system parties? I missed all of it. We missed the drugs as well. My generation got the wrong ones.’ Accounting for some of the minor key discordancy and sub-bass experimentation at the challenging end of his work, James Blake’s music can feel occasionally like the most wilful distillation of the generation that missed out on the last proper offline teenage rampage. His music is full of shadows because he was born into the half-light, coming of age when the lights went on at the party. James’ generation were left to placate the woeful worries of turning boy-to-man without the comfort blanket of a brand new shape for bacchanalia. ‘We were 20 years too late,’ he says. ‘And,’ he laughs, ‘I still don’t really know what becoming a man is.’

Because James Blake is an artist whose music doesn’t depend on the ardour of youth, because it can be sedate in its beauty and rage, with each record his craft acquires a new vintage. The Colour in Anything might yet be considered his masterpiece. The influences are strange and new. Alternate listens suggest David Sylvian, Chet Baker, Laurie Anderson, Jeff Mills or Arvo Part. There are still genetic traces of the key records that marked his initial predisposition to make music – D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and Antony and The Johnson’s I Am A Bird Now – but they’re now so entrenched in his DNA to sound almost invisible. ‘Just growing up is almost synonymous with self-improvement. So I think that’s what this album is about: maturing and shedding a slightly childish skin and trying to become happier in the process.’

There are tangible signs that James Blake is growing into an artist with tenacity, fresh perspectives and endurance, perhaps in the mould of a post-club Peter Gabriel brushing the detritus from the dancefloor as the lights go up. When James started making records, they were full of distorting effects on his true voice. There was a sense that he may be hiding not out of purely experimental motives but also a sense of young, mannish embarrassment. ‘Absolutely.’ At 27, he is at that fascinating precipice where adulthood itself becomes a matter of fight or flight. ‘I was incredibly self-conscious about how my voice came across to other people. I was incredibly self-conscious, full stop.’ Amid all the lessons that love and learning have taught him, the art of letting go was the least expected. ‘It was convenient that I wanted to experiment because it helped me to hide away. I spent a long time in the wilderness. I’m out of it now.’

With the help of Rubin, Ocean and Vernon, even perhaps through the countless requests that came through to collaborate, James has found himself by learning to let go. The transparency of songs like My Willing Heart and Modern Soul would not, could not have happened before. “With Justin, I wasn’t that interested in making music with him, initially,” he says, “I just wanted to be his mate.” The recording happened anyway. With Rubin, it was about allowing a second pair of ears in at the crucial development stages of building a new world on record. “The first time I was at Shangri-La, one of my band came to visit. I came out in a white t-shirt and slack trousers, no shoes and socks and I looked like I actually was at rehab or I’d joined a cult. Oh, James has changed.” It was true. He had. With Frank, it was about building a mutual support system. “I love Frank. He’s magnetic. The myopic viewpoint of my music and maybe my life slightly got in the way for a second. Then I caught myself. I stopped being an only child on this record.”

For James Blake, the transparency of light now beckons. It may yet be the colour in everything.

Meeting up to help finish off each other’s songs, sometimes they would become cavernous rhythms and more than often the pair would record just for the hell of it. (On one occasion the two were purported to have stayed up recording the sound of hair swishing across a microphone).

Fusing the elements of disparate musics, the vocal sweetness of Laurel Canyon, Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston and the modern electronic space of the past 40 years, in their first recording ‘Come Save Me’ they created a contemporary psychedelia, with the beauty and simplicity of classic sun-soaked beach pop.

Just weeks after putting it online, it had heavy airplay on Australian radio and a seven inch release on new label The Blue Rider, receiving a positive reaction to the mix of old & new, the uninhibited rhythm and a song rooted in celebrating sadness, its heavenly harmonies jilted by a lyric informing how leaving a loved one can really expose how lonely love really is.

“You can’t trick people in to liking a song” says Gab “We knew we liked it and that we had a really good time making it”.

Understanding that what they had was important and needed to be documented, they decamped to a friend’s studio in France in the summer of 2012 to record their debut album - just the two of them in an empty farm two hours south of Paris, with an 808, a Fender jaguar, a laptop & a pair of vintage Neve console channels.

Their time at La Briche echoes like a strange psychedelic film: cycling in fields of sunflowers, copious amounts of cheese, growing caveman beards and going crazy in the studio. While working they listened to twisted electronica from Liars, Aphex Twin and Autechre. “And when we sat down to dinner we’d listen to Sinatra and Nat King Cole" says Gab.

Meanwhile next door lived a convoy of tradesmen with a thing for hardcore dub…“They were from a scene which is based around homemade soundsystems” says Jono “they take them out in to the middle of nowhere and play literally the hardest most sinister kind of music I’ve ever experienced. It is the weirdest thing in the world”.

The long ways from home helped them to bond and cement their sound and at the same time absorb some of Europe’s cultural and artistic influences from the fierce beats of Berlin’s Berghain to London’s most interesting corners. A mission to re-create a two man wall of sound ensued and with help from friends, locals and a pre-historic desk once used by Conny Plank, the pair set about re-inventing the warmth, harmony and audio sunshine they’d hatched back in Australia.

Their collaborators along the way included long-time friend & Warpaint drummer, Stella Mozgawa and renowned producer/mixer, Ewan Pearson, a friend from Berlin, and they love that the songs have travelled (“they followed us around the world” says Jono) and their balance between old and new, the discovery of something vintage alongside future-looking experiments.

“Finding great music from the past is a way of being adventurous” says Jono " It’s that sense of finding something that you feel belongs to just you”

By the dying days of 2012 their time in France had not been ill-spent and a debut album Howlin was recorded and ready to be mixed.

Their first release from these sessions, The Throw, saw them occupying a space where Screamadelica and its wayward children used to live. A joyful seven minutes weaving melodies & beats with the sole purpose of making people move, of throwing caution to the wind & reaching a higher level with a greater purpose, or maybe without one at all, it touched a nerve & helped soundtrack the last few months.

Next single, ‘The Man I Need’ is more introspective, beats minimal and Gab crying “all you say to me, is all you want to see, you’re not the man I need, that’s what you said to me”. Its ten-minute version climaxes with a voodoo drum-breakdown and the instruction “exercise your chemistry”, and was picked up & played in full by Zane Lowe on BBC R1.

Across the album, Howlin's songs are full of classic hooks but often end in dirty clanking breakdowns. Pop songwriting is buried in layers of crunching synths and pedal effects. “How can you look gloomy? When you look so good to me” wonders Gab in 'Uncertainty', repeating “be my light” over Jono’s techno-inspired beat.

Having played a couple of festivals last summer, adding Jack Freeman on bass, they kicked 2013 off back in Australia on the Big Day Out before playing a packed breathless NME show in London, Gab ending up topless, the audience lost in sound & strobes.

Since then they've toured Europe with Foals, and Australia with the xx and will be back in Europe to play more headline dates and festivals across the summer.

The explosion of colour and sound will echo throughout the year, Jagwar Ma is written on the wind, painted on the stars (as someone else once wrote…)

In 2014, Courteeners stand on the brink of unveiling their fourth and - by some distance - greatest album. In the six years since they released their sharp and underrated debut St Jude – a pinpoint accurate portrayal of youth enjoying life – the band have been steadily rising. All their albums have gone Top 10 – St. Jude (no.4), Falcon (no.6), ANNA (no.6) - and the growth in their live shows has been exponential and astonishing.

Just to take one example, on the 5th and 6th July last year, the band played two nights at the Castlefield Bowl, Manchester. They sold all 16,000 tickets in a day. In fact, they sold 100, 000 tickets in 2013 alone, also selling out Manchester Arena and Brixton Academy in the process. This time round – before the album’s even been heard by anyone outside the band’s inner circle– they find themselves headlining the Radio 1/NME Stage at this year’s Reading and Leeds Festival and handpicked to support The Killers at their 40, 000 capacity Glasgow Summer Sessions show on August 19th. The momentum is with them.

And the reason? Well, that’s when we need to turn our attention to the band’s singer and sole songwriter Liam James Fray. A riot of contradictions – romantic, sensitive, brash yet self-doubting – it’s his songwriting, an acute observation of how life is mostly lived, that has fuelled the band’s longevity, striking a resounding chord with an increasing large bandwidth of people across the country.

“Right from St Jude, everything was about how I was feeling,” explains Fray. “I did feel frustrated, stuck in a rut. But, I was full of ideas, watching the world go by outside, wondering if music could take me further than work, eat, club, sleep (a bit) die etc, I did seek escape from that life and I wrote about that. It wasn’t a formula. I wasn’t hell bent on capturing the abstract at 21. I wanted to focus on what was real. My world. Other people’s worlds. It’s what I knew. It’s what I grew up on. Pulp, Stephen Fretwell - they wrote about real life with frustration, heart and with humour.”

Concrete Love continues down that path. It radiates a confidence that’s perhaps best summed-up by the album’s two greatest moments, both of which are totally different to anything the band has attempted before.

Summer comes totally from leftfield, a joyous Beach Boys-eseque slice of perfect pop driven forward by a hypnotic, leaping riff. It’s a pure pop moment and all the more thrilling for it. It’s matched for freshness and ambition by Dreamers – a five minute epic that’s the perfect encapsulation of Fray’s outlook. It’s an atmospheric call to arms shot through with acute observation on the charts and underscored with a vibrant romantic sensibility. “The charts are full of cartoons and lawyers having a gap year before choosing their employers/But what about my life/Who is singing about that?” laments Fray, before a euphoric chorus bursts through. “Dreamers and writers/Risk takers and fighters….Come on and unite us”.

This new sense of musical sure-footedness is partly attributable to Fray’s relationship with producer Joe Cross. “Musically it was very liberating because we were creating in so many different ways. He gave me new confidence with my voice, I’ve never really had that before. I wasn’t forcing it, I was singing” laughs Fray.

“It was the most free I’ve ever felt in the studio, we were experimenting all the time, different people popping in and out at all hours of the day and night. Working with members of the BBC Manchester Philharmonic Orchestra and Manchester Ladies Choir really lifted the place and pushed us on….”

“The challenge, and the fun, is myself and Joe getting some of the songs - which often start from a folky perspective, on the acoustic or the piano to a point where I can channel my inner -Nick Zinner. I want them to sound big. It’s exhilarating feeling them grow. There are elements of Motown, UNKLE, Simon and Garfunkel!”

“St. Jude was punk and brash and exciting,” clarifies Fray, “but Falcon and Anna were totally different from that. I wanted us to push ourselves. When I listen to our music, I don’t hear any of the groups that we’re often associated with.”

To that end, the writing process for Concrete Love found Fray decamped to Paris. Starting in October last year, he spent three months writing and recording in the Montmartre (for a historical precedent Echo And The Bunnymen did the same thing when they were searching for the spark and inspiration for the extreme otherness of Ocean Rain).

It was a time spent walking the city seeking out new experience and something of that city’s nocturnal allure permeates the grooves of the new record. Having said that, it should be noted that the Gallic sojourn was followed up by sessions in a wholly different romantic setting - Whitby, then finally, homeward bound, in Ancoats.

The thing easily missed about Courteeners is that they might be earthed in the experiences of growing up in and around Manchester but there’s a tension in their music that comes from a desire and a fascination with breaking out of that.

It’s at the heart of what makes them such an interesting, contradictory group. With Concrete Love, it feels like they’ve finally got the balance right. It’s their most rounded and satisfying album to date and it coincides with a moment when they’re nearing the peak of their live powers.

That’s as good as summation as any. For Courteeners, it finally feels like their time has come.

Produced by Charlie Hugall (Florence and The Machine, Ed Sheeran), Paul Savage (Mogwai, Franz Ferdinand) and Peter Miles (We Are The Ocean, Futures, The King Blues) and with arrangements and strings from Valgeir Sigurðsson (Sigur Rós, Björk), the resulting 10-track album is bold, expansive, confident and cohesive - an undeniable step up in both diversity and volume from their critically acclaimed debut, Shallow Bed (March 2012).

Dry the River have announced a UK headline tour in October. The dates follow a number of festival shows over the summer, including appearances at Glastonbury and the Main Stage at Reading and Leeds.

They ended their last run of UK dates with a euphoric sold-out show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in November 2012, a year which began with them appearing in the BBC ‘Sound of 2012’ poll. This tour will see them play their biggest headline show yet, at The Forum in Kentish Town, London.

Iggor and Laima took MixHell from the studio to the stage, adding uplifting elements of rock into electronica and giving it all an organic, intuitive and complimentary touch. Armed with an MPC Sampler, turntables, CDJ's, mixer, a full drum-setup and miscellaneous percussions their eclectic and energizing live stage performances are pure eye- candy with music created on the fly. MixHell do things in a big way and in doing so, are delivering a show that fully explores their vast background of musical influences.

A quite engaging and unique experience which the whole BNR crew have once more experienced during MixHell's headlining show on last years Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project, held in Berlin.

The MixHell line up for 2013 and beyond boasts a new member in the shape of Max Blum. For a number of years now, Max has been a part of the MixHell studio setup - collaborating on beats and basslines and generally adding to the overall groove. In 2013 he steps out of the studio and on to the live stage as the new and improved LIVE shows from MixHell include Max on bass guitar.

MixHell had their first appearance on Boysnoize Records back in 2009 with Brodinski's Remix of their one-shot single ’Highly Explicit’, where they gained respect in the emerging scene almost overnight. But it wasn't until last year 2011 when their first debut EP ’ANTIGALACTIC’ saw its light, that brought them finally up to the worldstage of the EDM scene. Their smash hit was nothing but a mindblowing combination of sounds, that sees the act dive into rock, electroclash, and cyber punk, creating a spaceage anthem.

This day, MixHell are taking it to the next level with BNR proudly presenting their long-awaited debut album ’SPACES’ being released beginning of 2013. We will give you heads up soon enough, but can already announce that prior to the fully executed masterpiece MixHell will touch base with the 1st single ’EXIT WOUND’ (Oct. 29th), which will come with an impressive remix package. The group of remixers confirmed so far reads like a who is who of today's electrodance heroes (more details to be revealed soon). A fitting force for a release that knows no bounds. To round it up for ’EXIT WOUND’ there will be a music video, directed by US based brazilian video maker Thiago Zanato, starring the lead singer of the known hardcode punk band 'The Dillinger Escape' Greg Puciato.

As you can see, sticking to one genre only when expressing yourself artistically is totally overrated. BNR give their word for it!

Stay tuned for more info on MIXHELL’s debut album ’SPACES’ ... ... and their first impact ’EXIT WOUND’ !!

Singer Ty Taylor, guitarist Nalle Colt, bassist Rick Barrio Dill, and drummer Richard Danielson have successfully channeled the vitality of their live show into a fresh and urgent take on Primitive Soul, a groove-fueled sound that Yahoo! once painted as “James Brown singing lead for Led Zeppelin” and “blending blues, soul, and riff-heavy rock & roll with joyfully gritty abandon.”

Longtime devotees of incendiary artists like Ike & Tina Turner, Little Richard, and

Chuck Berry, Vintage Trouble possesses sharply honed instincts for rhythm and groove and unabashed showmanship. Now based in L.A.’s musically famed Laurel Canyon, the band first played together in 2010 and soon brought their high-energy brand of soul to weekly residencies at local venues like the Edison and Harvelle’s Blues Club. As they steadily amassed a following, Vintage Trouble eventually drew the attention of Doc McGhee (a legendary music manager best known for working with KISS, Bon Jovi, and Mötley Crüe). Once under McGhee’s wing, the band set their sights overseas and — by 2011 — had taken the stage at Britain’s influential TV show Later...with Jools Holland, delivering powerful performances of “Blues Hand Me Down” and “Nancy Lee” (a stirring serenade to Taylor’s mother, penned from his father’s perspective).

After joining Queen guitarist Brian May on tour in May 2011 and Bon Jovi on tour that June, Vintage Trouble put out their debut album The Bomb Shelter Sessions and quickly saw the album hit the UK Top 40. Also charting as the No. 1 R&B album and No. 2 rock album on Amazon UK, The Bomb Shelter Sessions had its U.S. release in April 2012 and fast earned acclaim from such outlets as NPR, The Wall Street Journal and Billboard. By the end of the year, in the pages of the New York Times, critic Val Haller had hailed Vintage Trouble as a modern-day answer to Otis Redding (“Like Otis Redding,” Haller remarked, “Vintage Trouble makes music that is a little bit of everything”).

Along with appearing on Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (four times!), The View, Conan, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, as well as at major festivals like Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Glastonbury, Vintage Trouble continued to keep up a grueling touring schedule in support of The Bomb Shelter Sessions. The band spent a large part of this time opening for such artists as The Who, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Lenny Kravitz, Paloma Faith, Joss Stone and Willie Nelson.

At a hometown gig at the El Rey Theatre in summer 2013, Don Was (a three-time Grammy Award-winner known for his work with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Al Green, and Iggy Pop) caught the band live for the first time and found him floored by their explosive performance. “Half of the songs were brand new and totally unfamiliar to the audience…yet the place was rocking from the first notes straight through to the final encore,” recalls Was. “Do you know how hard it is for a new band to pull that off? It requires tremendous charisma, thundering power, incredible grooves, and top-notch songwriting.”

In the spring of 2015, Vintage Trouble inked a deal with Blue Note Records, and set to work on their major label debut 1 Hopeful Rd. Recorded at L.A.’s East West Studios and mixed by Tom Elmhirst (Mark Ronson, U2, The Black Keys), 1 Hopeful Rd. borrows its title from the album’s opening number and lead single “Run Like the River.” With its foot-stomping rhythm and gospel harmonies, “Run Like the River” embodies the infectiously irrepressible mood that runs throughout 1 Hopeful Rd. and gives even the album’s most pained moments an electrifying edge. The follow-up to Vintage Trouble’s debut album The Bomb Shelter Sessions — a self-released effort praised by Paste magazine as “the stuff the best soul’n’roll is made of” — 1 Hopeful Rd. matches that emotional intensity with a raw yet sophisticated musicianship that’s prompted BBC Radio 6 to crown the band “the heirs of rhythm and blues.”

With Vintage Trouble fiercely dedicated to constantly playing and creating new music — including a 2014 fan-only EP called The Swing House Acoustic Sessions – music legends such Prince (who name-checked Vintage Trouble in an early-2014 interview with MOJO) and Lenny Kravitz (who noted that the Vintage Trouble live experience bears the same feeling as “being at the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967”) were struck by the band’s passion and musical prowess. When describing their own sound, Vintage Trouble use the term “formatted recklessness”: a fantastically paradoxical phrase that captures the spirit of a band whose music is wildly unhinged but rooted in real musicality, gut-punching but thought-provoking, steeped in the heritage of old-school soul but utterly and irresistibly timeless.

In January 2017, John Varvatos tapped the band to appear in his much-celebrated music campaign series, bringing their foot-stomping rhythm and irrepressible spirit to electrify his new Spring / Summer 2017 Campaign. Throughout 2017, Vintage Trouble will release a handful of new songs starting with the blistering new track “Knock Me Out,” released on February 15th.

Vintage Trouble shows no signs of slowing down. Stay tuned for a lot more exciting music.

Le Carousel is the new band project from acclaimed Belfast DJ/recording artist Phil Kieran. A DJ with an international reputation, Kieran is also renowned for his techno productions on dance labels including Soma, NovaMute and Bugged Out! In the mid-noughties Kieran formed punk/hardcore act Alloy Mental, who released the album ‘We Have Control’ on Skint Records in 2007. He followed this with the amazingly diverse solo electronic album, ‘Shh’, for Sven Vath’s venerated Cocoon label in 2009.

For ‘Le Carousel’ Kieran assembled some of Ireland’s finest musicians, writing most of the album while staying in Donegal on the remote west coast. Fittingly ‘Le Carousel’ evokes feelings of half-remembered childhood day-trips and windswept empty beaches. Fans of emotive Electronica, blissful Balearica, artists like Spiritualized, Slowdive, Pink Floyd, Goldfrapp, Steve Reich, Rothko, Bat For Lashes, and Galaxie 500 should sign up here, although anyone with a heart is going to take something away from this extraordinary piece of work.

A metaphor for the rotations occurring in everyday life, ‘Le Carousel’ – released on Kieran’s own label PKR - was a labour of love for its creator. “It all pivots around an idea, a concept, it’s a diary of a part of my life,” says Kieran. “Over a two-year period I decided to really make the best thing I’ve ever made, and maybe will ever make.”

Two influential music figures already sold on the new album are music and film soundtrack producer David Holmes, and DJ/Producer Andrew Weatherall, who have both remixed tracks. Weatherall has remixed club single ‘Lose Your Love’, while Holmes has remixed the new single ‘Carousel’.

Banhart first attracted international notice with his 2002 debut album, Oh Me Oh My… The Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit – a collection of recordings he had made for himself. Pitchfork said in its review: ‘Banhart’s promising debut is the sign of someone destined for great, strange things.’

Of the follow-up, Rejoicing in the Hands, The Times said, ‘The last time such a prodigious talent came on the scene was when Jeff Buckley released his first album, perhaps a fine reference point for the ambition and ability at play here; but Banhart – less refined but more audaciously gifted – sings his own song, and seems blissfully oblivious to the idea that anyone might be listening. But, soon, many will be.’ Subsequent albums include Niño Rojo, Cripple Crow, and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.

Banhart has collaborated with fellow musicians including Antony and the Johnsons, Beck, Vashti Bunyan, Os Mutantes, Swans, and Vetiver. He also has performed with both Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and was part of a David Byrne–curated concert at Carnegie Hall.

An accomplished visual artist, Banhart’s distinctive, minutely inked, often enigmatic drawings have appeared in galleries all over the world, including the Art Basel Contemporary Art Fair in Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. He has created the cover art for most of his records, and in 2010 his artwork and packaging for What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy.

Devendra Banhart, released his Nonesuch Records label debut, Mala, in 2013. The singer/songwriter co-produced the record with his longtime bandmate, guitarist Noah Georgeson.

Banhart’s 2009's release, What Will We Be, received critical acclaim, with Rolling Stone calling it ‘The best he’s ever made’. The Los Angeles Times said the record ‘Found him making comfortable, laid-back folk that didn’t sound like a compromise – more like an artist growing into his own.’

Recorded early last year at Royal Studios in Memphis, Soulsville celebrates the music, sounds and legacy of Memphis and was produced by Grammy nominated Justin Stanley (Prince, Beck); it features original material co –written by Knight, alongside a handful of classic Memphis covers. The new tour will see her perform favourite tracks from this latest hit album, including the self-written radio 2 A-listed airplay hit Middle of Love and Knight’s stunning version of the Ann Peebles classic I Can’t Stand The Rain as well as fan favourites spanning her recording career, with a nod to her newer role as leading lady of the west end.

Triple Mobo winner and multiple Brit nominee Knight commented “Last year was so full of professional highlights - releasing my 8th studio album Soulsville and performing again in the West End to name but two. My first love is appearing on stage as myself and I can’t wait to give it my all again on the I ♥ Soulsville Tour.”

Self-recorded in the rehearsal rooms in the German and Danish capitals, Pinkunoizu’s debut album is a meditation on the concept of time filled with hazy pools of feedback and repetitive beats. “We were trying to look into alternative experiences of time as something elastic, expandable, modal,” says Andreas. “Aspects of remembrance are of course connected to this theme, and runs like a disturbed signal through most of the record as well.” It’s been a constant theme in the band’s work since the first song they penned together, Time Is Like A Melody, which opens the album. “It connects the listener to one of the most incomprehensible mysteries of being,” says Andreas. Elsewhere, songs deal with subjects ranging from the Arab spring to cyborgs and feminism – the country twang of Cyborg Manifesto.

An unpredictable, involved but nonetheless ear-friendly listen that establishes deep, immersive grooves, Free Time! represents the far-ranging recording processes of this unusual band. “I like the idea of taking little snatches from the world that surrounds us and putting those into the music,” says Andreas. “We've recorded random sounds from around our homes and used them as textures.”

Comprising Jaleh Negari (drums), Jeppe Brix (guitars) Andreas Pallisgaard (guitars, vox) and Jakob Falgren (guitars, keys, foot pedal bass), the four members of Pinkunoizu formerly played together in the acclaimed Danish post-rock group Le Fiasko. With eight people in that band, improvisation was difficult. In Pinkunoizu, the foursome form a flexible core. “Starting Pinkunoizu was a great relief for us, since we could feel that we were nurturing a space where we could play music for real and have a great say – all four of us,” says Andreas. It allows room for guests, such as Nils Gröndahl, who plays violin and bowed saw, and reflects the prevailing scene in Copenhagen. “Copenhagen people tend to play music with each other in temporary constellations, and some of that old-fashioned band structure has withered away a bit,” says Andreas.

Outside of the band, Andreas and Jaleh are preparing to do a soundtrack for a documentary on the Danish artist Das Beckwerk. Aside from that, “Some are working, some study, some have studied, some have worked, some are looking for work to do to earn money. Some like to play ping pong.”