Opened up by the delirious alchemy of contemporary pop music, Sean O’Hagan leaps back into life with High Llamas, with a set of killer tunes reflecting on dimensional levels how definitions change over time. Arranged by Sean and produced with mix collaborator Fryars to engage the eardrums in non-stop new possibilities, Hey Panda radiates optimism inspired by the joys and sorrows felt in former lifetimes and the diverse conundrums of today alike.

In Ki moun ou ye Nathalie Joachim asks, “Who are you?” This is a question Nathalie has been answering since her previous album Fanm d'Ayiti, a love letter to Haitian women, the foremothers of Haitian music, and the matriarchs in her personal life.

Ed Harcourt releases his new album, El Magnifico via own imprint, Deathless Recordings. The self-produced album was recorded at his own Wolf Cabin studios with finishing touches made with assistance from producer Dave Izumi Lynch at Eastbourne’s Echo Zoo Studio.

Recent years brought about for Julia Holter an existential focus on human connection, amid the staggering change that came with the death of loved ones (including her young nephew, to whom the album is dedicated) and the birth of her daughter. On Something in the Room She Moves, Holter vividly processes the complexity, gravity, and awe of this confluence of experience. She calls the music “sensual,” “flowing,” and “nocturnal”–a testament to how love, with all of its challenges, “reroutes neural pathways.” The cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, artist Christina Quarles, highlights the multiplicity of intimate connection: are the figures embracing or in battle?

Deep Sea Vents is a collaboration between Bruce Hornsby and yMusic, who are artistically known as BryhM. The album was produced by Hornsby and Rob Moose, Music violinist. Guest artists are Branford Marsalis, soprano sax on "Platypus Wow" and "Phase Change," Mark Dover, clarinet on "The Wake of St. Brendan" and "Deep Blue," and Chad Wright, drums on "Deep Blue". BryhMexplores seafaring themes, sounds and metaphors encapsulated in progressive chamber music and Hornsby's vocals.

Formed in the late 70's, the duo is still grooving at their studio in Vesterbro, Copenhagen. Laid Back gained their first international major breakthrough in the '80s with "Sunshine Reggae" and "White Horse." The dualism and originality of the two songs has left a worldwide and everlasting reputation of their music. The third evergreen from their hand was made in 1990 named "Bakerman" altogether with a music video by Lars Von Trier. More recently, the two members has co-founded their own record company, Brother Music, which has released Laid Back singles such as "Cocaine Cool," remixes from Soul Clap, and latest the mini-album Cosyland and the chill out album, Cosmic Vibes. In 2013 they released the double album Uptimistic Music. 2019 was the 40th anniversary and release of the album Healing Feeling. 2023 marks the year of a new 21-track studio album Road To Fame.

It's a safe bet to expect the unexpected in regards to any new Lambchop effort, but the cryptically titled (and beautifully packaged) What Another Man Spills is the band's most consistently surprising and deliriously eclectic outing to date, with new twists around every corner. While it's their loveliest record since How I Quit Smoking, that album's countrypolitan gauze is largely a thing of the past, replaced here by a dreamy, jazz-like patina which proves a remarkably versatile backdrop not only for Kurt Wagner's originals but for a vast range of covers, from Dump's "It's Not Alright" to Curtis Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)." The latter is easily the most jaw-dropping track on What Another Man Spills, with the group easily slipping into the song's soulful groove without a hint of irony, not even in Wagner's amazingly Prince-like falsetto; a later cover of the Frederick Knight smash "I've Been Lonely for So Long," while less surprising, is no less engaging, further solidifying Lambchop's growing debt to the Stax/Volt sound.

Leaving Songs by Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples is his second solo album; his first, Lucky Dog Recordings 03-04, wasn't released in the States until now, as it is included here, thankfully, as a bonus disc. Leaving Songs is a true departure for Staples. The vocals and backing tracks were recorded in Nashville by Mark Nevers with the overdubs recorded back at Lucky Dog in the U.K. After the first lines of "Goodbye to Old Friends," the opening cut, it's obvious that this record is different, in its way, from what Staples has done before, either with or without his band; the tempo, horn lines, the chorus of female backing vocalists.

Judie Tzuke came to fame in the late 1970s with the classic album, Welcome to the Cruise and the timeless hit, ‘Stay With Me till Dawn’. Since then she has sold hundreds of thousands of albums, alongside countless sold out gigs all around the world. Judie Tzuke‘s new album, her 20th studio album, Jude the Unsinkable is an eclectic mix of wonderful songs, which have taken form over a rocky six years since the release of her last critically acclaimed album.

Tindersticks are a band whose music is defined by a mood as much as a style, and if anyone is looking for proof to that theory, 2021's Distractions will do nicely. The lush, expansively orchestrated sound of 2019's No Treasure but Hope was a stellar example of prime Tindersticks, a sprawling canvas composed from an infinity of small details. Distractions, on the other hand, is nearly as powerful while sounding atypically spare, created from what for this group is the bare minimum of elements but still achieving the cool, majestic tone of their most famous work. Tindersticks leader Stuart Staples has said Distractions isn't a lockdown album, but that the isolation imposed on its production by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reinforced a creative choice that was already in place, and this music clearly took creative advantage of the limits that outside circumstances imposed on the musicians.

Michael Head, former frontman of the Pale Fountains and current co-leader along with his brother John – who is also a Strand – of Brit pop outfit Shack, turns in a stellar chamber pop performance with Magical World of the Strands. Head, who is no stranger to either classy, baroque pop or neo-psychedelia, has composed an album of gorgeously illustrated songs that are lushly orchestrated by a standard rock quartet augmented by a flutist (Leslie Roberts) and a string quartet. The result is an album that, while little known, is a classic, a masterpiece of modern chamber pop.

Berlin-dwelling Dane Agnes Obel has been racking up the accolades throughout mainland Europe since her platinum-selling 2011 debut, Philharmonics. With the beguiling Citizen of Glass, her third studio long-player, she looks poised to enchant the rest of the world with her dark charms. A classically trained pianist with an elegant and elastic voice, Obel's melancholic chamber pop invokes names like Goldfrapp, Bat for Lashes, and Anna Calvi, but with a succinct aura of Scandinavian refinery. Where her relatively austere prior outings relied largely on piano and strings, Citizen of Glass revels in ghostly electronics and voice modulation, even going so far as to bring in a temperamental, late-'20s monophonic synthesizer called a Trautonium. The string arrangements are more ambitious and the composition style is a bit more opaque, but the ten-track set is unequivocally Obel-esque. Taking its name from the German concept of the gläserner berger, which translates roughly to the glass citizen, Obel explores the idea of transparency in the overshare-heavy digital age.