Hit Singles

Hit Singles

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava/Laminated Denim/Changes

In a challenge to name the undisputed overlords of modern psych rock, two heavyweight contenders spring to mind – Osees and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Both bands have a lot in common: their resistance to said definition, for starters, along with their omnivorous musical appetites and protean vision. They also share a ferocious work ethic, releasing an avalanche of records in what seems like an urgent and endless artistic venting. ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It’s hard not to boggle at King Gizzard’s stats. This month the Melbourne sextet release three albums of new material, bringing 2022’s tally to five. So far. Since their 2012 debut, they’ve averaged 2.3 albums per year, going into overdrive (again with five) in 2017. It’s the kind of rate that seems diarrhoeic, a likely sign of bloated creativity and reluctant self-editing, but KG have been scratching their expressive itch in increasingly inventive ways since 2012’s 12 Bar Bruise. As introductions go, it’s fun if hardly original – a rough-necked mix of ramalama punk, bluesy garage rock, surf rock and US alt.rock that’s light years away from where they are now. The following year’s… Read More →

Hit Singles

Dry Cleaning – Stumpwork

If you’ve turned on BBC 6Music in the last few years, you’ll have probably heard a lot of talking; not the DJs, but rather the prevailing tide of sprechgesang in modern indie. Arguably starting with The Fall and The Flying Lizards, it was carried on by Pulp, Earl Brutus, Life Without Buildings and then The Streets, and is now flooding our airwaves. It comes in many forms: there are the modern pioneers like Sleaford Mods and Courtney Barnett, the cartoony post-punk of IDLES and Yard Act, the infectious Wet Leg and Self Esteem, the peerless Fontaines D.C. and Black Country, New Road. ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut London’s Dry Cleaning are also in that clan, but their releases so far – a handful of EPs and last year’s New Long Leg LP – have presented a group that’s fully formed and strikingly unique. Musically, they flit impressively between Sabbath riffs, Smiths sophistication and dreampop haziness, with Tom Dowse’s guitar usually soaked in chorus and phaser, Lewis Maynard’s bass playing chunky chords and riffs, and drummer Nick Buxton alternately powering and atmospheric. Above all this, though – metaphorically, but also in the… Read More →

Hit Singles

Pink Floyd – Animals (2018 Remix)

Animals was always something of a runt in Pink Floyd’s 1970s litter, which is appropriate for an album obsessed with beastly metaphors. Conceived as a vicious commentary on Britain’s social decay, it never fitted comfortably in the Floyd’s timeline, lacking the humanising warmth of Wish You Were Here without quite achieving the furious grandeur promised by that marvellous cover or later attained by The Wall. That could be down to the circumstances of its creation. The first Pink Floyd album recorded at Britannia Row, it was almost entirely the work of Roger Waters, whose domination was starting to exacerbate tensions within the band – most notably with Richard Wright. Even the cover was Waters’ idea, albeit executed by Aubrey Powell – Hipgnosis’s co-founder Storm Thorgerson was another member of the Floyd circle who had fallen out with Waters. ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut This new mix too has been coated in dissent. Made in 2018 by James Guthrie (who also did the 5.1 Surround version), it was delayed because of a squabble about sleevenotes. At David Gilmour’s insistence, the contentious notes have been dropped from this release and the accompanying book… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Greatest Albums Of The 1960s

Presenting our latest online exclusive: The Greatest Albums Of The 1960s, The greatest music of the decade, as voted for by Uncut, 500 albums reviewed! Get inside the music, with our selection of archive interviews. Buy a copy here!

Hit Singles

The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne: “We don’t care if 20 year olds on acid liked it or not”

Axl Rose! Cat Stevens! Songs to sing at funerals! As a 20th-anniversary boxset expands the technicolour universe of THE FLAMING LIPS’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, WAYNE COYNE reveals the real story of how his band of freaks inherited the Earth. “We just embraced it all, and did it our way,” learns Sam Richards, in the latest issue of Uncut magazine – in UK shops from Thursday, October 13 and available to buy from our online store. When Wayne Coyne answers our FaceTime call, he’s just leaving his local hardware store. Presumably he’s a valued customer – down the years, Coyne has personally constructed many of The Flaming Lips’ fantasy environments, from the 10-foot-tall chrome head installation that inspired King’s Mouth to the makeshift film sets around Oklahoma City where he filmed Christmas On Mars. “We don’t have a production company,” Coyne grins, still self-sufficient after all these years. “It’s just us weirdos, you know?” ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut At 61, his creative spark remains undimmed. Having just painted a whole new series of covers for the upcoming deluxe reissue of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots – Uncut’s Album Of The… Read More →

Hit Singles

Joe Strummer – Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years

Looking back 20 years later, it seems clearer now that Joe Strummer’s final three albums were each made under very different circumstances, for very different reasons; listening to them, it seems all the more remarkable how cohesive they sound, all shouting from the same street. ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The group Strummer dubbed the Mescaleros began as a band in name only, but then rapidly evolved into the real deal, only to be stopped in their tracks in the worst way, just as things had started to fly. The music they recorded across their 1999–2002 lifetime – the albums Rock Art And The X-Ray Style, Global A Go-Go and Streetcore, which are collected together in this striking new set along with an album’s worth of outtakes, demos and orphaned tracks titled Vibes Compass – documents this process. You can hear it especially when you assemble it all back to back like this, as a testament of the time: a band mutating fast through different shapes, different tensions, different harmonies. Still, despite the varying conditions that fed it, all this music identifiably comes from one single place: that unique zone instantly… Read More →

Hit Singles

Brian Eno – ForeverAndEverNoMore

The first public taste of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE could hardly have transpired in more extraordinary circumstances. As Brian Eno sang menacingly of “rock and fire” and “gas and dust” amid an ominously swelling storm of distorted synths, smoke lingered in the nighttime air and ash rained down from the heavens. He was standing on the ancient stage of Athens’ Odeon of Herodes Atticus, in the shadow of the Acropolis, and these were not special effects. Wildfires were ravaging the Greek countryside, and when he cautioned that “these billion years will end”, his voice dropped in a potent mix of angry admonition and desperate resignation. The song felt like a warning from the gods. ORDER NOW: Bob Dylan is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The occasion was the inaugural live performance last summer by Brian and younger brother Roger, in celebration of their debut full-length collaboration, Mixing Colours. Its timely release in March 2020, as the UK’s initial Covid lockdown began, allowed its gentle solo piano instrumentals to recast our sudden, alien emptiness as a welcome opportunity for a breather. That premiere a year later of “Garden Of Stars” – and “There Were Bells”, which engages with similar themes –… Read More →

Hit Singles

Buzzcocks – Sonics In The Soul

Can there really be a Buzzcocks without Pete Shelley? The singer-songwriter, who died in 2018, fronted the band for 41 years, writing or co-writing hundreds of songs including such copper-bottomed classics as “What Do I Get?” and “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’tve)”. His death leaves a massive hole. And yet, lest we forget, Shelley himself stepped into a similar space when original singer Howard Devoto left in 1977, leaving the lead guitarist to transition to singer-guitarist, main songwriter and frontman. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The rest is history, and while the lineup has survived numerous changes to the rhythm section over the years, guitarist (originally bassist) and vocalist Steve Diggle – who now steps up to solely front the band – has hardly been a slouch. Along with numerous co-writes with Shelley, he wrote and sang the likes of the hurtling “Harmony In My Head”, “Autonomy” and “Love Is Lies”, the acoustic ballad that threw such an effective, bittersweet curveball into the middle of 1978’s Love Bites. Having now been a Buzzcock for longer than anyone including Shelley and having taken on more vocal and songwriting duties as the… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Cure – Wish (Reissue, 1992)

The trouble with a masterpiece like Disintegration is that at some point you have to follow it up. Released on Robert Smith’s 33rd birthday – April 21, 1992 – Wish turned out to be the perfect mix of light and shade. Any gloomier and The Cure would have been accused of milking the misery when there wasn’t much around – Disintegration had been wildly successful, establishing them as a stadium act around the world, despite Smith’s best intentions – and they’d already let their hair down with 1990’s irreverent (and prescient) remix collection Mixed Up. Indeed, it was while recording Mixed Up’s lead single “Never Enough”, slathered in Porl Thompson’s guitar, that Smith remembered how much fun playing together as a band could be, especially now Lol Tolhurst was out of the picture. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut In this blithe spirit, and armed with 18 months’ worth of ideas, the band headed to studios in Cornwall and the Cotswolds where they demoed around 40 songs, before settling in at Richard Branson’s Manor Studio in Oxfordshire in September 1991 to record the material that would make up Wish and its excellent B-sides. Smith… Read More →

Hit Singles

Beth Orton – Weather Alive

Stormy psychic and physical weather buffeted Beth Orton as she made this record. When long-standing health issues were correctly diagnosed and medicated in 2014, the ground perversely shifted beneath her feet. Meanwhile, 2016 saw the release of Kidsticks, the most electronic album of a career which has eased between her pioneering ’90s folktronica’s polar extremes. But as this personal flux continued, the organic sound of a battered, stand-up piano in her garden shed became her anchor. Playing this unfamiliar instrument recalled picking up a guitar to write songs in the ’90s, returning Orton to first principles. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Relying on simple, modal patterns, she then began to sculpt homemade soundscapes using her midi setup. In the process, vivid memories rose up, ranging from old affairs in New York to the loss of her friend Andy Weatherall, becoming the nascent album’s flickering heart. “I kept reliving these fragments of past lives,” Orton recalls, “and putting them in music was like putting them in amber. A moment would be there like light on a wall, it didn’t hang around long, and I’d write around that.” These sensual visions were then rigorously honed… Read More →

Hit Singles

Makaya McCraven – In These Times

Makaya McCraven’s seventh album under his own name, In These Times, opens with the sound of applause and a swarm of strings that quickly coalesce into a galloping rhythm, and then something unexpected happens: a human voice asserts, somewhat mysteriously, “I never want to be known as anybody opposed to progress… It just kinda seems to me that nobody has the right to take away our responsibility to finish what these people have died for”. It’s a clip of Harry Belafonte speaking with broadcaster Studs Terkel for his Chicago Public Radio show, and the statement neatly encapsulates McCraven’s mission as a drummer, producer and arranger. He draws from the music of the past to comment on the present, which allows the album to bound gracefully from one idea to the next – from free jazz to classical, from soul music to hip-hop, from prog to minimalism. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Born in Paris, raised in Massachusetts and based in Chicago, McCraven is considered one of the leading lights of contemporary jazz, yet to call him simply a jazz musician understates the range of his playing and the scope of his vision. He… Read More →

Hit Singles

Marianne Faithfull – Songs of Innocence And Experience, 1965-1995

Throughout her storied life, Marianne Faithfull has been in a tussle with her reputation. Sometimes it looks like a dance. Often, it is more like a fight. Though she’s now revered as an elder stateswoman and a valued collaborator – Warren Ellis is her latest pet – this compilation explores the first two acts of Faithfull’s career. ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut In the clichéd telling of it, Faithfull was manipulated and underestimated, if not exploited, during her pop career, before clambering from the wreckage and finding her own voice. If Faithfull sounded damaged – vocally, she did – the point was underlined. She has dismissed her early recordings as “cheesecake”, though her habitual flintiness has prompted others to diminish her achievements too: in a famously combative interview with Lynn Barber, the journalist tried to extract some small revenge by suggesting that Faithfull was “a singer with one good album”. In which case, why does she continue to fascinate? The good album in Barber’s reckoning is Broken English. While it’s true that the 1979 LP marked a clear kink in the road and is widely considered to be Faithfull’s masterpiece, it now sounds… Read More →

Hit Singles

Pixies – Ultimate Music Guide

As they release a great new album, we present the Ultimate Music Guide to the Pixies – and their magnificent sister group The Breeders. From the spectacular breakthrough, through the mounting tensions and split – and the surprising rebirth – this is the full story of an incredibly influential art-rock band dynasty. “You’ll think I’m dead, but I sail away…” Buy a copy here!

Hit Singles

David Sylvian – Blemish/Manafon

Interviewed in 2009, David Sylvian mused upon the supposed difficulty of Manafon, his last vocal studio album to date. “I don’t personally hear it as being a difficult album, but I’ve always known the experience would be different for others. Time will soften its edges. It may sow the seeds for what might develop into a new genre for vocal music perhaps? Or maybe it’s simply a passing glitch on the digital face of popular music. I don’t know. But what I am sure of is that, over time, its abstractions will become much easier to embrace.” ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The reissue of Manafon, along with its older sibling, 2003’s Blemish, on 180g vinyl, offers an opportunity to reconsider what increasingly look like the last works of David Sylvian’s long, brilliant and elliptical pop career. It’s fair to say they haven’t yet seeded a new genre – though you might find echoes of these spectral artsongs in the work of Björk and Julia Holter. But as predicted, they now seem eminently embraceable: tatterdemalion torchsongs, that for all their atmospheric disturbances you might file alongside Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Frank… Read More →

Hit Singles

Fleet Foxes: Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 30, 2022

For the last few tours, Fleet Foxes have closed their live sets with “Helplessness Blues” – a song about Robin Pecknold’s struggles to overcome existential worries about his place in the modern world. “What’s my name? What’s my station?” he sings. “Oh, just tell me what I should do”. In the 11 years since the song was first released, you could argue that the conditions that first inspired Pecknold to write “Helplessness Blues” have become more pronounced; but the man singing the song in 2022 is evidently in a different place entirely. Indeed, watching Pecknold bobbing and bouncing around the stage tonight with infectious, Tiggerish enthusiasm, you could be forgiven for thinking that the knotty soul-searching of Helplessness Blues and Crack-Up, its successor, had happened to someone else. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It transpires that Shore – the band’s most recent studio album – was a turning point for Pecknold. Having finally worked through his anxieties, the record was awash with positivity, gratitude and optimism. Even during lockdown and surrounded by the death of his musician heroes, Pecknold refused to turn inward and instead threw himself wide-open. In the midst… Read More →

Hit Singles

Ezra Furman – All Of Us Flames

Plenty of artists openly protest against their categorisation along genre lines, while many more just quietly resent it, but across five albums since 2012, Ezra Furman has unabashedly channelled the rock’n’roll classicism of Reed, Dylan, Young and (especially) Springsteen, while repurposing its power to a unique end. In the run-up to 2013’s breakthrough, the hectic Day Of The Dog, Furman, who came out as a trans woman last year, declared her ambition was to be like Elvis, Buddy Holly or Patti Smith, and though solo identity as a group leader was on her mind there, not glory, with the blazing All Of Us Flames she’s stepping into the spotlight. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It follows 2019’s Twelve Nudes and the previous year’s Transangelic Exodus and though it wasn’t planned as part of a trilogy, when the new LP was finished Furman noticed she’d intuitively been developing the themes explored on those earlier records – very real institutional threat and the active oppression of minority communities, including her own. The title is lifted from the single “Book Of Our Names”, whose springboard was the second book of the Hebrew Bible. It… Read More →

Hit Singles

Lou Reed – Words & Music, May 1965

In 1965, Lewis Reed was a half-formed thing. In fluctuating quantities he was a street poet, a reporter, a Greenwich Village folkie, a comedian, a pop hack. He had his own ideas, some of them borrowed, a few of them blue. He was an experiment. He wasn’t yet an original. Run the tape backwards – to 1963/4, say – and it’s evident that Reed’s metamorphosis was speeding up. Back then, when two years in pop history was an age, the Dylanisms came loaded with harmonica and deference to the workmanlike chug of the blues. Peer back further, into the mists of Reed’s teenage imagination, and you’ll hear the innocent joy of doo-wop, but also a pre-echo of The Velvet Underground’s last proper album, Loaded, from 1970. The end and the beginning were the same. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut As an act of archaeology, Words & Music, May 1965 is an understated triumph. The album is the first fruit of an exploration of the Reed archive, excavated from the office of Sister Ray Enterprises Inc in New York’s West Village. The collection reaches from Reed’s final performance in 2013, back to… Read More →

Hit Singles

Loudon Wainwright III – Lifetime Achievement

“How old is 75?” Loudon Wainwright III asks near the end of his new album, Lifetime Achievement. There’s a rickety banjo strumming in the background as he answers his own rhetorical question: “So old you’re barely alive”. It lands like a punchline, but Wainwright tempers that levity with an almost unbearable gravity. On the verses to “How Old Is 75?” he notes that he’s already outlived his mother by one year and Loudon II by 13. What does that signify? Nothing really. It’s just the math of mortality, which measures the quantity but not the quality of years: “With our allotted amounts, what gets done is what counts”, he sings over strings that quiver and quake. “Was it time wasted or was it well spent?” ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It’s not necessarily a new sentiment, but Wainwright delivers it in a way that makes it sound like wisdom passed down from generation to generation, from artist to listener. And what has he done with his own allotted amount? A lot, it turns out. In addition to landing memorable roles in films (The Aviator, Knocked Up) and sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Parks &… Read More →

Hit Singles

Dennis Bovell on his finest albums: “I have no problem calling the shots”

Originally published in Uncut’s July 2022 issue Pioneering producer, songwriter, dubmaster and now MBE, Dennis Bovell has been busy as ever as he heads towards his eighth decade. In the last year alone, there have been ongoing dub reimaginings for the likes of Animal Collective and The Smile, various archival and new Bandcamp releases, and Y In Dub, a new version of The Pop Group’s seminal Bovell-produced debut. “I got to get back into those tracks and marvel at the sounds I’d put down on the tape,” he explains of the latter. “They’re mad about dubbing, Mark Stewart especially, so they were going crazy!” Advertisement His latest project is a career-spanning anthology, The Dubmaster, so Bovell’s agreed to take Uncut through nine of the pivotal albums he’s helped create, from Matumbi’s reggae classics through to production work for The Pop Group, The Slits and Fela Kuti, and right on to his latter-day dub work. “I have no problem calling the shots,” he says of his firm approach to making music. “You need that iron fist. If I didn’t like something, I let it be known. And if I thought it could be better done some other way, I let that… Read More →

Hit Singles

Bill Pitman, Wrecking Crew guitarist, has died aged 102

Guitarist Bill Pitman, a veteran of The Wrecking Crew, has died at the age of 102. ORDER NOW: Joni Mitchell is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut As reported by The New York Times, Pitman died on Thursday August 11 at his home in La Quinta, California. No cause of death has been revealed, however Pitman reportedly spent the last month of his life recovering from an accident that left him with a fractured spine. Born on February 12, 1920, Pitman was raised in a musical household, as his father worked as a staff bassist for programming at NBC. His journey with music began at age five and through high school, making regular treks from New Jersey to Manhattan as an admirer of the local jazz scene. He began playing in jazz clubs around LA in 1951 (at age 31) and his career catapulted after scoring a regular gig in Peggy Lee‘s backing band. Advertisement He went on to perform regularly for The Rusty Draper Show, a radio gig that he stuck with for three years before being poached for session work by artists like Al Hendrickson, Howard Roberts, Buddy Rich and Red Callender. His introduction to… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Foundations – Am I Groovin’ You – The Pye Anthology

One of the earliest, most noteworthy chart battles in the UK was fought between Bayswater-based The Foundations and their north London contemporaries The Equals, with both bands striving to be the first mixed-ethnicity outfit to make it to number one. The former’s debut release, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”, triumphed when it reached the top spot in November 1967, eight months before their rivals’ “Baby, Come Back” followed suit. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The victors had been honing their craft in clubs and dancehalls for two years as The Ramongs and The Ramong Sound. A change of name brought success, but the template remained the same: upbeat soul with singalong, pop-minded aspirations, yet infused with the edgier, grittier elements of Booker T & The MG’s or the house band at Motown’s Hitsville power base. While The Foundations only troubled the Top 20 on four occasions, the commercial bounciness of their chart-topper, plus “Back On My Feet Again”, “Build Me Up Buttercup” – more of which later – and “In The Bad, Bad Old Days” only tells part of the story outlined on this 3CD anthology. They’re particularly in their element… Read More →