Innehållsförteckning för Review of the Year 2025 från UNCUT

Reads like us! The latest Ultimate Music Guide is our deluxe, updated edition covering the work of Joy Division and New Order. From startling post-punk to celebratory electronic pop, we salute the enduring power of and legacy of two of the UK’s most influential bands. It’s in shops on November 21 or available to pre-order from shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Also out on the same day from the same places is an expanded, 148-page edition of our Ultimate Record Collection: 500 Greatest Albums Of The 1960s… Ranked! It’s the definitive rundown of the greatest music of the decade, as democratically selected by Uncut’s panel of experts… Want to get into free jazz but don’t know where to start? Let Thurston Moore, Byron Coley and Neneh Cherry be your guides in Now Jazz Now:…

DRY CLEANING Secret Love 4AD On which the deadpan Londoners threaten to become the most important British guitar band of their generation while still trying to booby-trap the structure from the inside. Gripping. CAT POWER “Nothing Compares 2 U” DOMINO Chan Marshall’s smoky, soulful take on Prince’s original reunites her with The Greatest live band – including Judah Bauer and Jim White – in advance of their 20th-anniversary album tour next year. LISA O’NEILL “The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right” ROUGH TRADE As previewed to a rapt audience at End Of The Road, this powerful six-minute lament is full of things that shouldn’t need to be said in 2025, but somehow still do. IMARHAN Essam CITY SLANG Next-generation Tuareg rockers strip it right down to the bare essentials before…

ÓLÖF ARNALDS SPÍRA BELLA UNION 7/10 First album in a decade from acclaimed Icelandic troubadour Her compatriot Björk’s description of Ólöf Arnalds as “somewhere between a child and an old woman” makes even more sense on her fifth album. These deceptively simple, acoustic songs of nature, family and love, so spritely they sometimes only narrowly escape mawkishness, could be centuries old, but sound as if they’re being sung for the first time. Her voice, meanwhile, remains as guilelessly pure as Dory Previn’s, albeit more wavering. The title track, about reunions with her son, is particularly touching, while gentle instrumental gilding from partner and producer Skúli Sverrisson lends “Úfinn Sjór” welcome winter warmth. WYNDHAM WALLACE AUSTRA Chin Up Buttercup DOMINO 8/10 Canadian electro-pop artist leaves her broken heart on the dancefloor…

Bold As Love – The Axis: Bold As Love Sessions EXPERIENCE HENDRIX/LEGACY RECORDINGS 8/10 THE popular caricature of Jimi Hendrix is that of the sensual hedonist, heroically stoned as he reclines on scatter cushions in some swinging West End apartment, being attended to by a bevy of supermodels. The truth is that he was one of the hardest-working men in showbusiness. Throughout 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played an astonishing 265 concerts and if the band weren’t playing haphazardly scheduled dates across Europe and North America at the behest of their manager Mike Jeffery, they appeared to be in a recording studio. In a fertile and febrile year filled with landmark albums – from Sgt Pepper to The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn; from The Doors to The Who…

What challenges did this compilation pose? I think the weight of the project was how to present it best in a way he would appreciate. More like, how do you release your grandfather’s music with care and [protection of] the legacy? There was a lot of uncovering of his life through the process that became so personal I had to slow down the process. The compilation process is only a glimpse of what the project has been since I started the reissues. Why the title Heavy Combination? It was actually extracted from one of his albums with his band Kamaru Super Stars and also fitted perfectly [to present] this array of music, styles and contexts of his music life. What impact has your grandfather’s work had on your own music?…

FACES Early Steps RHINO 7/10 Rod and friends find their feet. WHILE working on remastering the Small Faces’ back catalogue, archivist Rob Caiger came across a session tape that made little sense. Although the box bore the group’s name, none of the tracks listed were Small Faces songs and the session was dated September 1969, six months after they had split up. As soon as Caiger threaded the mysterious tape into a playback machine, he realised he had stumbled upon something special – the very first studio recordings of Rod Stewart with former Small Faces Kenney Jones, Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan plus Ronnie Wood, his fellow recent escapee from the Jeff Beck Group. Unknown, undocumented and barely remembered even by those who were there, further research revealed a convoluted…

LOW were regular performers at Chicago’s Lounge Ax, co-run by LTweedy’s wife Sue Miller, in the ’90s. But Tweedy and Sparhawk didn’t really meet until mutual friend Nels Cline joined Wilco in 2004. “Alan started coming to see us,” explains Tweedy. “My first memory of him was showing Nels a Les Paul that he’d just switched to.” “It was cool to meet Jeff, because I’d been a fan since Summerteeth and it was really exciting when Nels said he was joining the band,” adds Sparhawk. “We ended up playing some shows with those guys. Then Jeff started producing bands and it happened to be at the right time for us.” Adds Tweedy: “Certain bands that stick around for a long time become part of a constellation of people that keep…

UNCUT: So how has 2025 been for you? TAMARA LINDEMAN: My two tours were some of the most meaningful in terms of the right people, the music, just everything coming together. I had this whole visual show as well, and I structured the show as a story. I just did a lot of things that I’ve always wanted to do, so that was a really nice creative victory. Then I’ve had a really quiet fall where I’ve been writing songs again and going through a lot of evolution. It’s been a beautiful year for me personally and such an awful year in the world. Such a contrast. You released Humanhood in January. How did it feel to finally share such a personal album with people? It wasn’t my desire to…

Congratulations – Instant Holograms On Metal Film is one of Uncut’s best albums of 2025! TIM GANE: Thank you. We’re very happy that fans have welcomed the new album and given us lots of positive feedback. Ending up as one of the albums of the year is an unexpected bonus. You’ve toured pretty much non-stop since its release. How have the new songs been received? GANE: We’ve been playing live quite a bit and enjoying it very much. It’s great to play a bunch of new songs again and people’s reactions have been very encouraging. I think our set is now nicely balanced between the new songs and the older ones, and the new ones have integrated themselves into our live sound pretty seamlessly. “Melodie Is A Wound” is turning…

‘‘IT’S not hard to get the spirit in the studio, not when you really sing the song,” says Annie Brown Caldwell, matriarch of the ascendant gospel group Annie & The Caldwells. “If you know what you’re singing about, any place could be a church. The church is really you.” She’s sitting tonight in an unlikely church, a new-ish studio and event space called The Pyramid, nestled in northwest Nashville. It’s a strange place, with Egyptian art on the walls and a full-size sarcophagus standing in the lobby. The Caldwell family – Annie, her husband Willie Joe Jr, four of their children and one goddaughter – have been here for nearly 12 hours, recording new music on a rare day off. “It took so long that I was tiring out,” Annie…

CLIPSE Virginia Beach hip-hop duo consisting of brothers Terrence “Pusha T” and Gene “Malice” Thornton, discovered by Pharrell Williams and featuring the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, The Creator and Nas on this year’s Let God Sort Em Out. DURY: It’s like Nas and all that lot in it, all kind of superdudes. I thought that was good. JOSHUA IDEHEN Effusive spoken-word poet whose “Mum Does The Washing” poem went viral in 2024. DURY: I’ve got this great guy supporting us, a Nigerian poet brought up in Sweden. He just did …Jools Holland last week. He’s got a great vibe. It’s a really weird, talking poet dancing music, but madly optimistic. He throws weird shapes and gets right in the audience. It’s quite unique. He’s brilliant. GEESE Brooklyn art rockers…

STEVE Mason was at rock bottom when he penned what would become the first half of The Beta Band’s “Dry The Rain”. “I was living in Streatham with a load of reactionary, borderline racist London mods who were driving me round the bend with their fucking haircuts,” he remembers. “I was suffering from agoraphobia and depression. The lyrics – ‘This is the definition of my life/Lying in bed in the sunlight/Choking on the vitamin tablet the doctor gave me…’ – sum up how I was living. It’s really the feelings of a young man trapped by what’s going on in his brain.” Fleeing Streatham, Mason “muscled” his way into the two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush occupied by fellow Scots John Maclean (samples/keyboards) and Robin Jones (drums). A frequent visitor from…

10 WE ARE FUGAZI FROM WASHINGTON, DC Directors: Joe Gross, Jeff Krulik and Joseph Pattisall This smart, original live film was pieced together from footage recorded by fans at shows throughout Fugazi’s career. The result was a different take on the concert film, with the raw footage embellished by interviews with the fan-filmmakers; a celebration of Fugazi’s live power as well as the collegiate, democratic spirit that fired their music. 9 S/HE IS STILL HER/E: THE OFFICIAL GENESIS P-ORRIDGE FILM Director: David Charles Rodrigues The life of the avant-garde provocateur is fertile material for biography thanks to P-Orridge’s dabbling in numerous disciplines alongside the music they made with Throbbing Gristle. The film was made in the final year of P-Orridge’s life as they confronted their impending death and is an…

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS Flood ELEKTRA, 1990 It’s one of the records that I listened to over and over again. I don’t know what it was about it – the weird sounds, the accordion… there’s kinda nonsense lyrics for some of it, but then there’s something like “My Racist Friend”, which is a frickin’ great song that I need to cover, actually. I’ve always been attracted to weird music. They’re oddballs, there’s no getting around it, and there was something about that that appealed to me in my teens. I went to science and math boarding school, I was a hardcore nerd, so that fit really well. I memorised all the words, ’cause why not? I can still sing the whole record, probably, from beginning to end. Kinda useless, but…

You’ve just released your first album under your own name, with the Pan-Detroit Ensemble. What brought you back to your hometown? The opportunity came up to put a band together to play one single show here in Detroit. I told myself, ‘Go back home and find people who grew up listening to the same radio stations as you, playing in the same bars.’ That’s basically what this band is. I think we evoke the sound of Detroit, the feel of it, the certain rhythmic approach that comes from here. After years in the producer’s chair, you’ve recently been back playing live with Bob Weir & Wolf Bros. What happened? Something snapped in me around 2018 when I started playing with Bob. We’re playing to the Grateful Dead audiences, who are incredible.…

Southern Rock Opera SOUL DUMP, 2001 The audacious breakthrough: a double concept album setting the metaphorical and literal rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd against a backdrop of the South as Drive-By Truckers see it, a realm both marvellous and malevolent. Hood’s “Let There Be Rock” is an ecstatic hymn to the redemptive balm of loud guitars; Cooley’s “Zip City” an unsparing narration of the inner monologue of the priapic teenage boy. 10/10 The Dirty South NEW WEST, 2004 The music demonstrates DBTs’ facility with the ass-kicking and heart-warming strains of rock and country. The lyrics are a series of acute, astute and often very funny character sketches, from the washed-up kingpin of Cooley’s “Cottonseed” to the narrator of Isbell’s “Never Gonna Change” – an anthem for those Southerners who’ve…

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Feels: 20th Anniversary Edition DOMINO 8/10 Beautiful weirdness from band’s early imperial phase Animal Collective’s sixth album was originally released on FatCat but it’s the one that caught the eye of Domino, who release this 3LP 20th-anniversary edition on translucent grape biovinyl, naturally. Feels saw the band indulge their imaginations with a series of typically odd and beautiful songs, written partly on guitar tuned to an out-of-tune piano. This reissue adds B-sides and demos, while, for antique format fans, there’s FEELSLive 04/05, eight songs originally recorded on MiniDisc, now re-released on cassette, CD and MiniDisc as well as digitally. The B-sides are all great, particularly the excellent “People”, which fuses tribal chanting with an Eno-esque loop over six minutes, and the floaty two-minute bubble of “My Favorite Colors”.…

HORACE SILVER Silver In Seattle: Live At The Penthouse BLUE NOTE 9/10 Spectacular, never-before-released set from the beloved pianist at the zenith of his Blue Note career IF you could only pick one artist to represent the legendary jazz label Blue Note, pianist and composer Horace Silver would be a fair choice. His career was an auspicious one from the beginning, having co-founded the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey before moving on to leading his own quintet in 1956. The lineup included tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass and drums, a format that became his standard. The personnel would change during his time recording for Blue Note, but Silver’s own massive talent, consistency and aptitude for choosing skilled players to join him contributed to a popularity that grew in the ’50s…

‘‘I’VE known Trampled By Turtles since they first started,” says Alan Sparhawk, who produced the newgrass folk outfit’s seventh album, Wild Animals, in 2014 (Jeff Tweedy oversaw 2022’s Alpenglow). “Low took them on tour the first time they got out of the state. We’d had different members of the band play parts on records of ours over the years. Then, a couple of summers ago, they invited me out to ride along on some of their shows. A couple of the guys casually mentioned doing something together. Then I got a call: ‘Hey, we’re in the studio next week and it looks like we have an afternoon open. Do you want to come down and try a few songs?’ So this record was really about being in the same room…

UNCUT: How are you, Robert? ROBERT PLANT: OK, good! I’m getting ready for an adventure in America with these guys. Then we’re gonna finish off in York on December 23, en route to watching Hartlepool United on Boxing Day… Congratulations on the album Saving Grace – one of Uncut’s favourites of the year! We’re all really very flattered. I’m an old dog, admittedly, in this game, but the game has changed – the song actually doesn’t remain the same here. It’s a different thing going on, emotionally for us all, so it’s a great thrill for us to be actually growing as we speak. We cut another three tracks this week. We’re just continuing to record and to open up the gift we’ve got going on. It must have been…

UNCUT: Congratulations! Did you enjoy the second summer of Britpop? JARVIS COCKER: Thanks. It’s been all right! You don’t know until you do something whether people are interested or they will just say, “Oh, that’s nice,” and turn over the page. More was finished by January and the single [“Spike Island”] had gone down well, so I had hopes but didn’t expect it to be a No 1 album. I was very happy. NICK BANKS: I suppose you could call it the second summer of Britpop if you really want, but probably best not. I have thoroughly enjoyed the Pulp part of it. When I was 25, I assumed by this age I’d be retired rather than listening to my bandmate singing songs about girls with stripy socks. Luckily, people’s…

STAPLES JR SINGERS WHEN DO WE GET PAID  BRENDA, 1975; LUAKA BOP, 2022 As teenagers touring the Mississippi church circuit 50 years ago, the Staples Jr Singers recorded and released one album before Annie got married. When Do We Get Paid is gritty rural gospel, rough around the edges, but unexpectedly funky, and she sounds much older than her teenage years. The 2022 reissue relaunched her career on an international scale. 9/10 ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS ANSWER ME ECKO, 2013 Despite its slick production, the Caldwells’ debut has energy and charisma galore, thanks to Annie’s authoritative vocals, Joe’s liquid-mercury guitar and their tight family dynamic. They revived “It’s So Sad” for their 2025 breakout (retitled “Can’t Lose My Soul”), but the standout is the early version of Deborah’s harrowing tale…

30 JACKIE MITTOO Reggae Magic SOUL JAZZ While still a teenager, Jackie Mittoo became the keyboard guru of Studio One, leading a host of groups from The Skatalites to The Soul Vendors and working up his own hit songs – “Peanie Wallie”, for instance, later became The Wailers’ “Duppy Conqueror”. It’s just one of 18 gems on this fascinating, funky compilation, alongside a host of other classic Mittoo cuts from between 1967 and 1974. 29 THE EARLIES These Were The Earlies NAMES RECORDS/TWO PIERS Hailed in these pages at the time as the best debut album of 2004, this 21st-anniversary reissue was a welcome reminder of the Lancashire-Texas collective’s ambitions. Their country-meets-psychedelia-meets-electronica symphonies were the fruit of several years of transatlantic remote jamming – and it still sounds remarkably cohesive.…

20 CHRISTY Directed by Brendan Canty Christy initially came on like a grittier take on Irish sitcom The Young Offenders, telling the story of a young care leaver (Danny Power) caught between respectability and wildness. But Canty’s debut feature unfurled into a more complex, surprising and moving film through its feel for the everyday textures of estate life and the fierce spark of Cork teenagers. 19 THE FIRE INSIDE Directed by Rachel Morrison There were more high-profile boxing films in 2025 – Benny Safdie’s Smashing Machine, Sydney Sweeney’s Christy – but none of them packed quite the punch of Ryan Destiny, superb as Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the scrappy teenage 2012 Olympic champion from Flint, Michigan, in this powerful debut feature from cinematographer turned director Morrison. 18 BLACK BAG Directed by Steven Soderbergh…

GILES MARTIN:They’re in a vault at Abbey Road. Everything has been kept. We’re missing two things: there’s no original two-track of “She Loves You”, there’s just a mono; and the same with one of the versions of “Love Me Do”. There’s no tape of that. I think the transfer we did from that was off vinyl. They’re the only two. It’s almost like a God-blessed archive. Not only that, but they recorded on something called Emitape, which doesn’t degrade. The weird thing is, the tapes have never left this building. I don’t have access to the vault – there’s a guy who goes down there and takes them out. It’s all controlled. My first job in Abbey Road was to work on Anthology 2 with my dad. I listened to “A…

D’ANGELO Revered neo-soul pioneer (1974–2025) “I FEEL like I’m part of a revolution,” D’Angelo told The Face in 1999, citing The Roots, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and Common as allies. “The fight, our fight, is to bring the music back to what it’s supposed to be about, which is the craft and skills, not money and all this other bullshit… I feel the pulse of the people, and they’re ready for something new.” By then, D’Angelo had already blazed a trail with 1995’s audacious debut Brown Sugar, fusing organic soul and R&B to hardened hip-hop beats. Taking cues from key influences like Prince, Marvin Gaye and Teddy Riley, it effectively birthed what became known as neo-soul. The platinum-selling album spent over a year on the US charts, partly driven by hit…

PUNK rock, candy, flying tampons and heroin – the Lunachicks story has all the ingredients of a great yarn. “We were drawn together by our personalities and then we became a band,” says singer Theo Kogan. “I was a ham. From the first show, I was throwing myself on the floor and rolling around. We saw the comedy in bands like Kiss who were drag queens without realising it. A lot of what we did was to crack each other up. ”Director Ilya Chaiken was at that first show in 1988. Her new documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story Of The Lunachicks finds the band reflecting on the strain of facing constant misogyny while writing songs about binge-eating and John Waters. When Chaiken began filming 10 years ago, the group were…

“Follow your instincts – it’ll always be borne out over the long run” WHEN driving into Los Angeles from his home in the Pacific Palisades, Cameron Crowe will often take a detour through West Hollywood to mingle with the ghosts of the Sunset Strip. “I heard this Peter Case song ‘On The Way Downtown’ recently. I think he’d lost a lot of friends, so he’s going downtown to just commune with the feeling, and I really relate to that. I still go past these haunts, both randomly and on purpose, and I really do believe that the spirits are still there and the feelings are strong in places where this grand adventure actually happened.” Crowe admits that during the writing of his new memoir The Uncool, he even scoped out…

SEGUNDO BLA BLA DISCOS, 2000 Where it all started: Molina’s repressed musical instincts are suddenly set free across 70 minutes. “The Wrong Song” sums up the twin poles of her art, moving from acoustic picking to microhouse beats, while “Mantra Del Bicho Feo” incorporates birdsong, wordless vocals and ecstatic, circling drums into an eight-minute masterpiece. 9/10 UN DÍA DOMINO, 2008 On her fifth album, Molina stretches out on eight long tracks, the most complex, hypnotic record of her acoustic era. Most of the pieces build from simple lullabies into madcap carnivals of loops, with the opening title track, the gradually raving “Los Hongos De Marosa” and the closing swing of “Dar (Qué Difícil)” the highlights. 8/10 WED 21 CRAMMED DISCS, 2013 Here armed with a Gibson SG and a ring…

Was there a moment when you both decided you wanted to work together again? There wasn’t really a single moment, and it happened really quickly. We learned how to play music together, and I think we always knew we’d play music together again. It was just a matter of when it would make sense. What was it like making music with your sister again? Did it feel like old times, or was the dynamic new? Both! Our dynamic is always ays the same, but our perspectives have evolved over the years. We understand ourselves better now that we’re older, and thus understand each other better. What was the writing process like? Katie and I wrote the songs independently, then brought them to each other and then to Brad and Jake…

How do you like to remember Chris Bailey? He was a magpie. He would listen and look so carefully. He also had this incredible Lennon-like imagination for lyrics. He was a surreal lyricist and a wonderful friend. There is a sense of a reckoning with life in the songs. I think Chris could sense… not the end, but he’d come a long way. Hence the title of the record. Chris being Chris, he would add something inappropriate, or not relevant. Rather than the Chinese reference, he put in a jazz reference. That was Chris all day long. He would be serious, but never afraid of levity and self-deprecation. What was it like being in his band? It was never the Chris Bailey show. He loved being in a band. He had…

What informed the choices of songs to revisit? Harmonic simplicity, songs with a minimum of chord or key changes. There was hardly any rehearsing, the group of musicians only coming together for the first time onstage. What is heard and recorded is being played pretty much for the first time. The performance is unique and the musical content, melody, notes etc won’t ever be repeated identically. What do AKA & Friends bring to these versions? Well, first off, they bring the joy of the “other”, then they produce timbres that are way out of my normal spectrum. Together we forge trust that allows us to take risks. And I guess risk-taking was how we approached the making of the record. It taught me to be less dependent on maths and…

80-51 80 MARTIN CARTHY Transform Me Then Into A Fish HEM HEM 79 SESSA Pequena Vertigem De Amor MEXICAN SUMMER 78 TURNSTILE Never Enough ROADRUNNER 77 MY MORNING JACKET Is ATO 76 EMMA POLLOCK Begging The Night To Take Hold CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND 75 SLOW MOTION COWBOYS Wolf Of St Elmo ARKAM 74 BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD Forever Howlong NINJA TUNE 73 ANNAHSTASIA Tether DRINK SUM WTR 72 NEIL YOUNG AND THE CHROME HEARTS Talkin To The Trees REPRISE 71 SHARON VAN ETTEN & THE ATTACHMENT THEORY Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory JAGJAGUWAR 70 STEVE GUNN Daylight, Daylight NO QUARTER 69 PANDA BEAR Sinister Grift DOMINO 68 MULATU ASTATKE Mulatu Plays Mulatu STRUT 67 MARK PRITCHARD & THOM YORKE Tall Tales WARP 66 ANDY BELL Pinball Wanderer SONIC CATHEDRAL…

1997 BOB DYLAN Time Out Of Mind COLUMBIA 1998 MERCURY REV Deserter’s Songs V2 1999 THE FLAMING LIPS The Soft Bulletin WARNER BROS 2000 LAMBCHOP Nixon CITY SLANG 2001 RYAN ADAMS Gold LOST HIGHWAY  2002 THE FLAMING LIPS Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots WARNER BROS  2003 WARREN ZEVON The Wind ARTEMIS/RYKO 2004 BRIAN WILSON  Smile NONESUCH 2005 ARCADE FIRE  Funeral ROUGH TRADE 2006 BOB DYLAN Modern Times COLUMBIA 2007 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM Sound Of Silver DFA/EMI 2008 PORTISHEAD Third ISLAND 2009 ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Merriweather Post Pavilion DOMINO  2010 JOANNA NEWSOM Have One On Me DRAG CITY 2011 PJ HARVEY Let England Shake ISLAND 2012 LEONARD COHEN Old Ideas COLUMBIA 2013 MY BLOODY VALENTINE m b v MY BLOODY VALENTINE 2014 THE WAR ON DRUGS Lost In The Dream SECRETLY CANADIAN 2015…

WHEN Suede previewed their week-long residency at the Royal Festival Hall at the Clore Ballroom in August, Brett Anderson was keen to celebrate Suede as “the anti-nostalgia band” of 2025. The setlist was drawn entirely from songs recorded since the band’s 2013 return – a run that includes 2025’s Antidepressants. “I love releasing new music and the reception to Antidepressants was great,” he says. “The five albums since we reformed have some of my favourite songs, but I am very aware we have a history that goes back 35 years and I do like playing the older songs. So when we tour in 2026 it will be a mix of old and new.” Suede have 10 albums under their belt – five from each half of their career – and…

BAXTER Dury and Jason Williamson are, by their own admission, a real-life Statler and Waldorf, messaging each other withering worldviews from their elevated cultural balcony. “I can always rely on Baxter to be equally as bitter and horrible,” says Williamson, relieved to have an outlet for the sort of opinions on music and more that he has to otherwise keep zipped in these be-more-kind times. “It’s good to know that I can not be like that when I text him.” Their friendship stretches back many years. “Wack It Up Bruv”, a 2009 track by Willamson’s Sleaford Mods, includes a shout-out to “Baxter Dury, the originator”; they met not long after. 2025 has been a typically busy year for both men. Dury’s latest album Allbarone was released in September and he…

1 All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978–1985 NIGHT SCHOOL 2 Roots Rocking Zimbabwe: The Modern Sound Of Harare’ Townships 1975–1980 ANALOG AFRICA 3 Histoire De Coeur: Lost French Synth-Pop 7’ers & Euro-Bombs (1980–89) CTR 4 2015–2025 Les Disques Bongo Joe: 10 Years Of Sonic Explorations  BONGO JOE 5 Eli Roth’s Red Light Disco: Dancefloor Seductions From Italian Sexploitation Cinema CAM SUGAR 6 Gilles Peterson Presents: International Anthem INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 7 Telepathic Fish: Trawling The Early 90s Ambient Underground FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCIES 8 Electric Junk: Deutsche Rock, Psych And Kosmische 1970–1978 CHERRY RED 9 Sensitive: An Indie Pop Anthology NEEDLE MYTHOLOGY 10 Habibi Funk 031: A Selection Of Music From Libyan Tapes HABIBI FUNK…

UNCUT: Congratulations! With almost a year’s distance since No Direction Home came out, has the film settled for you? JAMES MANGOLD: Thank you! I probably watched it a thousand times. You’re so deep in it and so focused on every cut and choice that it takes a while to look at the film objectively. When I’m sitting with an audience watching it, I can kind of let go. But there’s a kind of full separation that only happens once you’ve made a couple more movies. Do you know what Dylan made of the finished film? I’ve never heard officially, but I’ve heard from people who say he saw it and was pleased. Dylan posted about it on X: “There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what…

WHO decides what will be on Anthology 4? Ultimately, it’s the surviving Beatles and the Lennon and Harrison estates. Before a proposed tracklisting gets to them, however, there’s a brainstorm led by Giles Martin, which receives input from Beatles experts Kevin Howlett and Mike Healy. They come up with lists of what could be interesting to include and what there’s a particular appetite to hear. “They represent, if you like, the über-fans,” says Giles. “I’m a fan of The Beatles, but I work for them and that’s something different.” Giles says he’s interested in seeing how sketches develop into the finished artwork, and that’s an interest he’s able to bring to his work on Anthology. “I will then choose what I think is good to listen to. My belief, in all…

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Directed by: Scott Cooper Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young Released: October 24 7/10 TRAIN DREAMS Directed by: Clint Bentley Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr  Certificate: PG  Released: November 7 9/10 DIE MY LOVE Directed by: Lynne Ramsay Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield Certificate: 15 Released: November 14 8/10 THE ICE TOWER Directed by: Lucile Hadžihalilović  Starring: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl Certificate: 15 Released: November 21 7/10 ODYSSEY Directed by: Gerard Johnson Starring: Polly Maberly, Mikael Persbrandt, Jasmine Blackborow  Certificate: 15 Released: November 7 7/10…