The band have received countless awards, including Best British Band from Kerrang! and NME, Best Live Band from NME and Q, 3 BRIT award nominations for Best British Group (including one in 2021) and a Mercury Prize nomination for Album of the Year for 2009’s ‘Only Revolutions’. Frontman Simon Neil has also received Kerrang!’s Classic Songwriter award, as well as the inaugural Fender Play Award at the 2018 Q Awards, the magazine describing him as a “frontman who possesses the perfect blend of raw emotion and rock’n’roll charisma, the sort of figurehead who inspires the next generation to pick up a guitar”.

Released in August 2020, their eighth album ‘A Celebration of Endings’ gained praise from the likes of The Independent, who branded it “an album that soothes, shakes and surprises at every turn” in their 4 star review, whilst the Sunday Times made it their album of the week, describing it as “combining feral sonic attack with an innate melodic touch and lyrics about empowerment, activism, love and connection”. The album won the award for Best Album at the Scottish Music Awards 2021.

Biffy Clyro are due to headline Glasgow Green in September this year, followed by a run of intimate shows in England in October/November labelled ‘The Fingers Crossed Tour’ and a headline set at Download Festival on Sunday 12th June 2022.

Laura Marling's new album 'Semper Femina' will be released March 10th 2017 on Laura’s own label More Alarming Records via Kobalt Music Recordings. It was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Jim James).

Alongside the announcement of Semper Femina, comes Laura’s directorial debut with the video for the first fruits of the record and the album’s opening track, “Soothing”. The inspiration for which was a series of vivid dreams Laura experienced whilst making the album.

Now 26 years of age, Semper Femina is Laura’s sixth studio album in a little over nine years. It is a record that similarly addresses questions of how society views sexuality and gender but without seeking to provide definitive answers. It retains an openness to express and portray her own ‘voyage’ of self-discovery, but also to develop and learn as artist, performer, and as an individual over the course of her career.

Semper Femina was largely written out on the road, following the release of Laura’s acclaimed album, Short Movie, in Spring 2015. Its loose lyrical thread strings together her keen, freshly observed take on womanhood, and what Laura describes as a particularly ‘masculine time in her life’.

The announcement of Semper Femina follows the success of Laura’s recent Podcast series, Reversal of the Muse. As an exploration of femininity in creativity, the collaborative project opened up an important conversation around whether the lack of feminine presence in the studio environment would ultimately make any difference at all to the creative outcome. With no pre-conceived expectations, Reversal Of The Muse was as much about the conversation created than expecting a conclusive answer. Guests included HAIM, Karen Elson, Vanessa Parr, Dolly Parton, Shura, and Emmylou Harris.

Laura follows its release with a full UK tour throughout March 2017.

“…her voice is the headliner: Mic'd so close you can smell the cigarettes on her breath, it's sultry, wise, rueful and unapologetic, connecting a 1960s singer-songwriter tradition to the ache of the now.” – Rolling Stone

“Her songwriting brings together the diaristic and the mythical. Her voice is full of grown-up depth and subtleties….and she has the guitar virtuosity for arrangements that are resonant, intricate and propulsive.” – Jon Pareles, The New York Times

20 year-old twin sisters Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas have the vocal power and versatility to make you forget the external. Fresh, wholesome, honest and sincere, they both portray an easy-going, confident style that oozes a mixture of the untainted swagger of youth with the confidence and bravado of adulthood, and the soul of classic female icons well beyond their years.

Family harmony singing, especially sibling harmonies, has long been a staple of Country music, and Catherine and Lizzy deliver an intricate and effective vocal package. Their harmonies dissolve into the musical bloodstream and their original thoughtful and intuitive song lyrics aid the process. More to the point, both possess strong, powerful voices and a distinctive feel for modern Country.

In 2014, in between putting the finishing touches to their debut album, Ward Thomas headed out on the road, touring all across the UK and also working doing gigs and showcases around Nashville and other music venues in America’s deep south, where their uniquely ‘British-take on Country music’ has been well-received.

In the spring of 2014 they made the BBC Radio 2 playlist with The Good And The Right. That coincided with the releases of their FOOTNOTES EP, which featured their first non-original song. They make Dougie MacLean’s Caledonia very much their own as they strike a stunning balance between vulnerability and self-assurance.

Ward Thomas are one of the most refreshing acts to come along in some time and in ‘From Where We Stand’ they have put together a beguiling debut album that is sure to charm all who come across it. They are the kind of act whose future literally seems unlimited.

Alan Cackett (Founding Editor, Maverick Magazine)

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.

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…)

During the 1990s, Joe attended Elliott School in Putney, where he met his Hot Chip bandmate Alexis Taylor and his long-time friend Kieran Hebden. As a teenager, he progressed from indie and hip hop to drum’n’bass to house and garage, always thrilled by those moments when underground music infiltrated the charts.

As well as working on six Hot Chip albums and two with Raf Rundell as the 2 Bears, Joe has remixed the likes of Kraftwerk, New Order, Disclosure, Dirty Projectors, the Chemical Brothers, Wiley and Jessie Ware, produced tracks for Franz Ferdinand, Bernard Sumner, Little Boots and Dels, and released a string of solo singles. Gabriel, his haunting 2011 hit with singer Valentina, was his first big success beyond Hot Chip. “It made me feel that I was capable of doing things outside the band,” he says. A keen collaborator, he is set to appear on forthcoming projects from Michael Mayer and Tuff City Kids.

Petrol Girls are named after Pétroleuses, mythical women of the Paris commune who allegedly set fire to private property with Molotov cocktails made from milk bottles, and rejected traditional gender roles. The inspiration came from a talk on Women and Protest given by writer Laurie Penny, who loosely translated Pétroleuses to Petrol Girls.

The band first formed in 2013 for a house show that singer Ren was putting on to celebrate International Women’s Day. This feminist context was essential for the band’s formation within a wider music community that at the time did very little to encourage women’s participation.

Petrol Girls release their new album ‘Cut & Stitch’ on May 24th 2019.

When October Drift appeared at the start of 2015 with their beefy yet melodic sound, they had the confidence to win over all audiences.

Despite the early success of their incendiary debut singles – receiving support from Steve Lamacq, John Kennedy and Q magazine to name but a few - and string of sold-out gigs, this band still remain something of an enigma.

October Drift’s music is similarly ambiguous, characterised by their signature wall of sound guitars, soaring, ponderous vocals and driving, urgent drums.

And while staying independent and playing every town and city that will have you isn’t exactly the stylish thing to do in 2016, October Drift’s irresistible combination of feedback and harmonies deserves to shake every room in the country.

The band have gained a reputation for delivering blistering, high-energy live shows. Indeed, their first tour sold out before even releasing their first single, such is the buzz around their live performances.

With shows at BBC6 Music Festival, Dot to Dot, Tramlines and Camden Rocks already under their belts alongside a cult fan base spreading the word, and a focus too few peers in their position possess, the immediate future is very bright (and very loud).

‘Brooding, personally-etched song writing’ – Clash

“A distinct lack of social media presence made sure early cuts were shrouded in a sense of mystique, serving only to heighten the growing buzz” - Line of Best Fit

‘A band we’re probably all going to know about very soon’ – Louder Than War

Beginning their musical journey in rural Cornwall, Jon, Phoenix, Olly and Jack have gained a reputation as one of the South West's most exciting live acts following tours with Embrace and Sunset Sons.

The band released two EPs, The Line and Circle last year, and have performed at festivals including Glastonbury, Boardmasters and Port Elliot, as well as selling out a bi-monthly residency at Plymouth Barbican Theatre, and headlining Plymouth Pavilions ‘Introduces’ showcase.

King Kong Company set about their task and actually managed to hit the target, 12 tracks and 12 videos in 12 months, making some new friends along the way. The band's plan had always been to finish out the year long project and celebrate with a one-off hometown gig. At this gig they'd play all twelve songs they'd written that year, and that would be that, back to coin collecting and bird watching.

Tickets for that one-off gig went on sale and promptly sold out. The Forum was packed to the rafters and the room rocked. Like a reformed alcoholic tucking into a bowl of Buckfast ice-cream, the KKC crew got a taste of more from that experience and decided they'd play just one more one-off gig. They turned up at the Body&Soul stage at Electric Picnic and it felt like everyone who had ever watched one of their videos over the previous year had turned up too. The ground shook, the band were overwhelmed, people danced off the roof of the sound tower, it was the stuff of legend. King Kong Company have been doing just one more one-off gig ever since. Unsurprisingly it seems Buckfast ice-cream is somewhat addictive.

The following year Body&Soul booked the band to play the Main-stage of their festival and in 2016 KKC filled The Cosby Tent at Electric Picnic; those who couldn't squash in to the tent danced outside in the rain. Since that one off gig in Waterford in 2012 the band have been selling out venues all over Ireland (most recently selling out The Academy in Dublin) and they have been dubbed 'festival specialists' by the national press, bringing their bass and big beats to festival fields all over Ireland, The U.K. and Europe. In 2016 Pure M Magazine gave King Kong Company the Best Live Irish Act Award. Not bad for a bunch who were just postponing brushing up on their fly-fishing skills.

The bulk of the band originally hooked up while studying a mix of music, art and design in Waterford Institute of Technology. That mix of music and visual stimulation would eventually come in very handy, even though their parents probably didn't think so at the time, and let's be honest, they still don't think so. There were a couple of rock bands formed, a ska band and a precursor to King Kong Company that eventually fizzled out. A few years later a video artist by the name of Lofty called the lads back together, adding another couple of recruits for the 12 tracks in 12 months project. Most notable among these new recruits was a character called Boxhead, a performer who has brought the art of crowd fluffing to dizzying new heights. Imagine Bez from Happy Mondays in his heyday, with a bit more energy, access to Grace Jones' wardrobe and with a penchant for cardboard boxes.

King Kong Company's sound is based on a standard rock foundation with guitars, drums, keys, vocals and some brass, but built on this foundation is a superstructure of electro mayhem, underscored with dubby rumblings. KKC have been best described as playing Dirty Dubby Electro Rock. The band draw on influences such as LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, The Bloody Beetroots, The Chemical Brothers, Toots and The Maytals, Sleaford Mods, Lee Scratch Perry, The Prodigy, Daft Punk and Leftfield. Mix those acts together and serve with healthy dashes of irreverence, energy and devil-may-care swagger, and you're getting close to what King Kong Company are about. The music is punctuated with mind-bending live visuals and a retina-blowing light show. Boxhead ignites the fuse on proceedings, bringing energy levels to explosive heights and leading audiences on a merry dance, helping them oil the hinges of their inhibitions.

Since kicking things off in 2012, the band have been lucky enough to play with many of their heroes and influences. King Kong Company released their self titled debut album in June 2016, drafting in Neil McLellan for production duties. Neil has worked on every Prodigy album since Music for The Jilted Generation. It was a match made in heaven. The album received critical acclaim and it managed to get to number one... in the Irish Reggae Charts!? Truth be told, there hadn't been a new entry in the Irish Reggae Charts since Shaggy's It Wasn't Me in 2000 and all other spots were occupied by Bob Marley. King Kong Company are far from being a reggae band, but it's was nice to be number one in any chart. The album also snuck in to the Top 10 of the Indie charts, not half as impressive as dethroning Shaggy.

Once a year the band have a meeting to discuss what they hope to achieve for the year ahead and whether or not they'll do just one more one-off gig. Unsurprisingly, this meeting always takes place in a pub and tends to last a long time. Since that first chat in 2012, the thing King Kong Company have always wanted to achieve has remained unchanged - to have fun doing the thing they all love, playing the best possible shows to the biggest possible crowds in the best possible venues. If you get the opportunity, you should join them. A King Kong Company show beats the shit out of taxidermy or playing golf, but it's probably not as much fun as knitting woollen boobies.