‘We’re On Our Way Now’ is one of two new songs that will appear on the band’s double-disc LP, with the other being their unreleased track ‘Flying On The Ground’. On this new single, the Mancunian star explores the passing of a loved when deprived of the ability to say goodbye. Lyrically, the song is profoundly reflective and relatable, thus bearing the distinctive mark of Noel Gallagher. Whilst the 53-year-old’s songwriting has undoubtedly evolved since the dissolution of Oasis, his style will remain familiar to his listeners. It is one that prides itself on universality; the ability to capture a feeling or a moment in a way that many people can relate to.

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Whilst discussing his new compilation album on Absolute Radio, Noel Gallagher explained, “I realized it was the 10 year anniversary coming up this year and was like, “What about a Best Of?” and we kicked the idea around for a bit. I had a few tunes that I had never finished off for various projects in those 10 years. I think I had four and I went to a studio and recorded them, socially distanced of course, and the two that made it onto the album are the two that came out best.”

Given Oasis’ status as one of the biggest British bands of all time, it is very easy to forget the credentials of Noel Gallagher’s second musical project. Ten years on, the group have released three albums that have all been certified as platinum and have headlined a number of British festivals. Although it is unlikely that the whispers of an Oasis reunion will ever stop, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds look set to leave their own musical legacy in Britain.

Listen to the band’s new track ‘We’re On Our Way Now’ below:

In a press release describing the event, the organisers of the festival said, “Forged from the inescapable world of hip-hop and alternative culture that has come to lead the way over the past 12 months, ALT+LDN is a celebration of a fire new subculture no longer defined by genre boundaries or backgrounds. It’s about kicking against the norm, ripping apart the rulebook and celebrating individuality – with the raddest names in the game touching down for a Bank Holiday Monday you’ve never seen before.”

Thus far, the line-up includes: Playboi Carti, Architects, The Kid Laroi, Lil Yachty, Die Antwoord, Machine Gun Kelly, Ski Mask the Slump God, plus many more. Whilst the line-up is hugely diverse, they are all bound by an alternative subculture. Consider the unconventional artistic arc of Machine Gun Kelly from hip-hop artist to pop punk revivalist or Lil Yachty’s rise from the indie “SoundCloud rapper” scene of the mid-2010s. The artists that have been announced to perform at ALT+LDN all go “against the norms” of the music industry.

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As well as being a collision of alternative hip-hop and rock, the festival will feature a combination of English and American artists. British metal bands, such as Architects and Sleep Token, will be heard alongside the experimental hip-hop sound of Playboi Carti. In what will be a rather bizarre sight, the event will see both genre and culture collide and evaporate.

Entrenched in modern youth culture and the rebellious indie spirit that is always present somewhere in popular music across any generation, ALT+LDN provides a fresh new flavour that no other British festival has yet brought to the table. It will top off what should hopefully be a jam-packed UK festival season this summer.

Tickets for ALT+LDN will go on sale May 5th and will be available to purchase here.

Razorlight were one of many British bands that emerged out of the garage rock revival scene in the early to mid-2000s. Their 2004 debut album ‘Up All Night’ is currently certified as 4x Platinum, whilst their 2006 self-titled sophomore album is certified as 5x Platinum. The music that the group made during the noughties is undeniably iconic. Tracks like ‘America’, ‘In the Morning’, and ‘Golden Touch’ provided the soundtrack for a generation of British millennial’s teenage years.

After a 10-year hiatus, Johnny, Carl, Björn and Andy are back together in Razorlight.

To celebrate we are hosting a one off streamed concert broadcast worldwide on the 2nd June. Grab tickets here https://t.co/PdUIOtnNBb
#razorlight pic.twitter.com/VD1LCdEQsL

— Razorlight (@Razorlight) April 29, 2021

When Razorlight returned in 2018 with their fourth album ‘Olympus Sleeping’, only Borrell remained from the original quartet. Reflecting on the group’s recent reunion in a statement, Burrows said, “It feels incredible. We’ve spent the past week or two rehearsing. Playing these songs has been an absolute joy.The emotions that were going through me when we started playing ‘America’, I forgot to play the first half of the song – it was totally nuts. It’s been amazing. It’s so powerful playing these old tunes. It’s very very special.”

He added, “I’m really enjoying reconnecting with Andy and Carl, it’s like getting to know people again. I’m enjoying it because you never want to lose friends. It’s a horrible thing to think. It doesn’t really make sense. It definitely feels good to me on a personal level. On a creative level – amazing. We’ve been in the studio rehearsing and recording. As soon as the four of us are in the room, it just sounds amazing, straight away.”

Although the indie rockers now have just over a month to re-establish their musical chemistry, it sounds like they will have no problem doing so. What this reunion means for the band long-term? We do not know. However, judging by Burrow’s statement, the four artists are “recording” as well as “rehearsing”, suggesting that perhaps new material is on the way. Whilst we will probably not hear any new material as soon as June, 2021 could perhaps stage the start of another one of Razorlight’s renaissances.

Tickets for Razorlight’s live online concert are available to purchase here.

‘Climate Live’ is an exclusive series of live music concerts that is scheduled to run from April 24th to October 16th 2021. Organised and announced by a collection of music artists and activists – including Declan McKenna – the concerts will take place across 43 countries. Mckenna’s recent performance was the first in this international series, with Groove Armada, Milky Chance, and many more also set to perform in the coming months.

The motivation and aims of ‘Climate Live’ were explained in a statement: “Led by members of Friday for Future youth climate groups, who organise the school strikes started by Greta Thunberg and supported by Music Declares Emergency, Greenpeace and many more, ‘Climate Live’ is bringing artists, activists and young people from across the world together through music to unite in the fight for climate justice and the race to safeguard the future of the planet.”

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Often wrestling with the crises of modernity, Mckenna’s music represents the attitudes, aspirations, and bugbears of Gen-Z; a generation that refuses to subscribe to the notion that: “That’s just the way it is”. Whilst the song sends a different message, the overtly political sentiment of ‘British Bombs‘ was a fitting accompaniment to the ‘Climate Live’ concert.

Discussing the track back in 2019 with NME, Mckenna said, “I think too often it’s implied that matters in the world are too complex to not end up with war, or to not possess and sell weapons, and I just think it is pure bullshit. Not only do we still engage in wars far away from our homes, which settle nothing and fuel extremism in the aftermath, we sell weapons to other countries full well knowing where they end up. I wanted to write a song that was outright against war, in any form.”

Two years on and in an equally defiant manner, the 22-year-old has recently discussed the political motivations for his ‘Climate Live’ performance: “The question I’d ask world leaders is what disaster are we waiting for? There’s so much reason and so much cause to change the way we’re doing things right now and why wait? Why wait to act on this? We really are already seeing the impacts of climate change, of temperatures rising all around the world. We are already seeing the impact of pollution, the impact of all of this stuff for many years now – why wait? Why wait to do something massive?”

Assured and eloquent, the role that McKenna will play in the lives of a generation of teenagers and young adults is likely to stretch far beyond music. The role that he has already played in setting up the ‘Climate Live’ concerts is simply an indicator for what is about to come.

Watch Declan Mckenna’s performance of ‘British Bombs’ for ‘Climate Live’ below:

Centred around the urban underclass in sixteenth century London, the novel is aimed at teens and young adults. Speaking about the ‘The Dark Lady’ on Instagram, Akala said, “My new novel is inspired by Shakespeare’s series of ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets. Most period stories tend to focus on elites and so I wanted to write something from the perspective of poor people from the streets back then and was pleasantly surprised by how much research was available into life in the slums of sixteenth century London and also on the presence of Black people and other ‘foreign’ immigrants at the time.”

He added, “Although it’s set in 16th century London and inspired by Shakespeare’s work “The Dark Lady” it is also inspired by one of my other passions… the history of the ‘medieval‘ West Africa. The backstory for Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady”, I imagined a migration from the kingdom of Benin, across Mali and through Timbuktu, into the Mediterranean into Venice and finally to London. The Dark Lady’s fathers story becomes inspiration for Shakespeare’s “Othello”.”

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It is unsurprising that Akala chooses to superimpose medieval West Africa onto a familiar sixteenth century world. As a part of history that has been entirely ignored by the Western canon, the decision represents the 37-year-old’s wider interest in exposing the racial legacies of colonialism and the subsequent oversights of contemporary British society.

Released in 2019, Akala’s ‘Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire’ focussed explicitly on these two things. Interspersing these history lessons and postcolonial analyses with personal memoirs of growing up in Camden, Akala struck a perfect balance in creating a book that was both highly informative but extremely readable. Just as he embedded medieval West African history – a world that will be alien to many readers – into a familiar Shakespearean world in ‘The Dark Lady’, Akala used these personal memoirs to soften the heaviness of his intellectual content in ‘Natives’. In both cases, he makes sure not to alienate his readers, and instead speak in a way that everyone can understand.

These other artistic pursuits, which also include a comic book series and a children’s book, have meant that Akala has been incredibly quiet when it comes to releasing music in recent years. His previous album ‘Knowledge Is Power II’ was released back in 2015, and since then his solo releases and guest features have been sparse. Now that his debut novel has finally been released, there will pressure for the polymath to get back in the studio – if he has not already – and re-affirm himself as one of the UK rap scene’s finest wordsmiths.

Akala’s debut novel ‘The Dark Lady’ is available to purchase here.

The new podcast is an offshoot of ‘Dissect’, an American podcast that is similarly concerned with unpacking albums. Whilst ‘Decode’ will concern itself entirely with British musical projects, ‘Dissect’ focusses on albums by artists from the US. Eight series in, the original podcast has explored Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’, Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’, and many more.

As one of the most high-profile UK hip-hop albums of the last decade, it is unsurprising that ‘PSYCHODRAMA’ has been selected as the first album to be analysed in this new British series. Following the narrative of a therapy session, the concept album is punctuated by spoken word interludes from Dave’s “therapist”, played by Fraser T. Smith. The project is wildly ambitious and epic in its scope, as Dave wrestles with childhood trauma, domestic abuse, institutional racism, and mental health issues.

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The man tasked with giving listeners a track-by-track breakdown of this extremely dense album is Kayo Chingonyi. The critically acclaimed Zambian-British poet said of Dave’s debut LP in a press release: “To me, the album connects with Britain’s long history of colonialism and in particular the effects of this on Black people, specifically, and immigrants to the UK more generally. The ways that institutions treat people. I feel like there’s a deep connection between this album and those issues. The renewed questions that people have been asking of institutions like the police force in the last few years are the questions Dave is wrestling with on this album.”

He added, “I feel like Decode offers an insight into how Dave’s kind of lyricism works on an album like Psychodrama because we talk about how skilful he is with words not just to tell a story but as a way of revelling in the musicality of language for its own sake… It was fun to talk about those poetic flourishes and how, in a very intentional way, Dave fashions a vivid portrait of life’s lowest lows and highest highs.”

As Chingonyi notes, ‘PSYCHODRAMA’ is intimately connected with the effects of institutional racism. In particular, ‘Black’ is a track that not only explores the Black British experience but considers the black identity in terms of the entire African diaspora. Dave raps, “Black is so much deeper than just African-American/ Our heritage been severed, you never got to experiment/ With family trees, ’cause they teach you ’bout famine and greed/ And show you pictures of our fam on their knees.”

Listening to ‘PSYCHODRAMA’ is often like going to the classroom to be taught, but the difference is that Dave is teaching you what you were not taught – that is the point.

Listen to Decode’s first episode covering the album’s opening track ‘Psycho’ below:

As part of Subway’s “Plant-Based Beats” campaign, the track seeks to champion veganism. Via PlantWave technology, the vegan artists were able to sample sounds from plants that are used as part of Subway’s plant-based menu. The campaign launch was accompanied by a video uploaded to TikTok, alongside a seven-minute YouTube documentary that depicts the recording process behind the track. Both pieces of content were directed by Jamal Edwards, founder of SB.TV.

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Whilst discussing the way in which ‘Vegang’ came about in a press release, P Money said, “Before Subway invited us to the indoor farm to record the plant-based beat, I couldn’t process the fact that a plant can make a sound but it’s actually mad! The bars in this track are about my journey to becoming a vegan and I’ve tried to incorporate the whole message behind what we’re trying to do with Earth Day and raising awareness. At the end of the day this is what we’re about.”

Star.One added, “This wasn’t something we’d done before but we’ve remixed the plants melody with our own vibes, to create the first ever plant-based grime beat! You have to kind of move with the times these days because people are demanding more vegan options, and so the fact that Subway are getting involved is wicked.”

This legendary MC and sibling production duo are historical collaborators. However, the last time that they linked up was on ‘Originators’ back in 2019, a high-octane, jungle-inspired track also featuring Scrufizzer and Maxta. Respectively, these artists have a long-standing history in the UK music scene, and so were a perfect fit for this campaign.

Angie Gosal, marketing director of Subway UK & Ireland, also spoke about the track in a press release. She said, “As more people champion plant-based lifestyles, we’re excited to be involved in the release of the first-ever grime track made from plant sounds. With our ever-expanding vegan range, Earth Day felt like the perfect opportunity to celebrate Subway now having one of the biggest and tastiest plant-based menus on the high street, to offer you even more choice.”

There is certainly a growing sense in the mainstream that veganism could be play a serious part in the solution to environmental issues. Earth Day 2021 hopefully provided many people with a chance to re-consider the relationship between food, people, and the environment.

Watch the backstory of how ‘Vegang’ was created below:

With Dayes on the drums and Misch on the electric guitar, the duo create a range of jazz, funk, and samba improvised grooves that showcase their undeniable chemistry. Released last year, their collaborative album ‘What Kinda Music’ was a masterful example of this chemistry. Combining electronica and acid jazz in a way that allowed both artists to bring something distinctive to the table, the album helped to fuel the fire of the ever-growing UK jazz scene.

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Whilst discussing the pair’s musical relationship in a press release, Misch said, “Yussef comes from a more experimental background, and he has a lot of loose, crazy ideas. I know how to write a catchy melody, but with interesting chords and I have a good understanding of popular song forms, so I think I streamlined those ideas and made them accessible.”

On a more personal note, Dayes then added, “Both our parents, who’d never met each other before, are now best friends as a result of this – they now see each other more than we do! I’d like to think, in some small way, that [‘What Kinda Music’] has a similar impact for people too – everything feels so divided these days, it would be nice for people to hear the record and hear two very different musicians coming together and realize it doesn’t have to be that way.” Indeed, although they come from two different musical worlds, the duo have undoubtedly found a harmonious middle ground.

Whilst Tom Misch has continuously featured in the UK charts over the past few years, Yussuf Dayes – despite being an integral part of London’s underground jazz scene throughout the 2010s – is less well known. ‘What Kinda Music’ was Dayes’ first record since the split of Yussef Kamaal in 2017, his musical project with Henry Wu a.k.a Kamaal Williams. Even more recently, he collaborated with Ben Howard on the singer-songwriter’s most recent album ‘Collections From The Whiteout’. As he has already done, the jazz experimentalist is poised to play a crucial role in the development of the genre in the UK.

London’s (especially South London’s) current jazz scene is vibrant and diverse, ranging from the afro-jazz of KOKOROKO to the electronica-jazz fusion of Moses Boyd. Tom Misch and Yussuf Dayes’ unique musical partnership sits perfectly within this contemporary scene.

Whilst it flirts with dancehall rhythms, ‘Outta Space’ is not a conventional dancehall track by any means. The song’s dramatic orchestral opening and use of choral vocal samples are just two examples of the interesting musical choices made by Stylo G and the Fanatix. According to the artists, the production was inspired by Busta Rhymes’ legendary double time flow. They stated that the famed flow “will always remind us of something not human and from outta space”.

Raised in Spanish Town until he was fifteen before moving to South London, Stylo G has certainly held onto his Jamaican roots in his music. In his biography on the Universal Music website, the 35-year-old is described as “an artist determined to make dancehall a credible contemporary genre again”. Indeed, he has never attempted to pander to current musical trends, even though it would have been very easy for him – as many other British artists have done – to jump on the UK afrobeats wave. In turn, the cinematic production of ‘Outta Space’ should be read as a defiant attempt to push the dancehall genre forward.

Stylo G’s infectious energy is undoubtedly matched by Busta Rhymes on this latest track. Incorporating patois into the first section of his fiery, fast-paced verse, the legendary American MC once again proves his versatility when it comes to rapping (if there was ever any doubt).

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Despite his unwavering commitment to the dancehall genre, Stylo G has a diverse range of songs in his musical catalogue. With over 25 million plays, his most played track on Spotify is his collaboration with DIVINE on ‘Mrichi’, which also has over 200 million views on YouTube. Injecting his distinctive patois-inflected style into this Indian hip-hop track, Stylo G validates himself as an international poster boy for dancehall.

With a musical career spanning over ten years, you would expect that the British-Jamaican star would have an array of projects under his belt; however, he has only one solo EP to his name. Fans will certainly be hoping that ‘Outta Space’ is an indicator of something more substantial dropping later in the year.

Listen to Stylo G and Busta Rhymes’ new collaborative track below:

Nearly three years on from her debut studio album ‘Lost & Found’, Jorja Smith fans have finally been promised a new project from the 23-year-old. The record will be comprised of eight tracks and will have only one feature, coming from South London MC Shaybo. Speaking about ‘Be Right Back’ in a press release, Smith said, “It’s called be right back because it’s just something I want my fans to have right now, this isn’t an album and these songs wouldn’t have made it. If I needed to make these songs, then someone needs to hear them too.”

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‘Gone’ is a song which appears deeply personal, as the Walsall-raised singer-songwriter wrestles the notion of losing a loved one over contemporary, piano-driven R&B production. She sings, “My God, you took him at the corner/ On God, you lost it in the moment/ What now, you’ve caught yourself a case and/ Maybe the world would be much better off without ya.” The meaning of these lines is rather ambiguous. Smith addresses God as if she is referring to a loved one that has passed away, and yet the following line she sings “you’ve caught yourself a case”, instead implying that the person in question has been lost to the prison system.

Judging by her press statement regarding the new track, it seems as if this multivalence was very much intentional: “There’s something about being able to write about one thing and for it to mean so many different things to others. I love that this song, well any of my songs really, will be interpreted in different ways, depending on the experiences of the people listening. This one is just me asking why people have to be taken from us.”

Smith undoubtedly has a knack for relatable but nuanced songwriting. As a song that explored the dynamics of an unbalanced relationship, ‘Addicted’ similarly delved into her own personal experience in a way that could be outwardly generalised to the potential experiences of her listeners. ‘Be Right Back’ will be another opportunity for Smith to both strengthen her emotional connection with her hardcore following and build new ones.

Listen to Jorja Smith’s new single ‘Gone’ below: