Innehållsförteckning för January 2026 från UNCUT

WELCOME to the last Uncut of 2025. But as we bid farewell to the old year, a new one beckons – in this instance, our annual preview showcasing many of the sure-to-be highlights of the next 12 months. You’ll find a slew of interviews with the likes of Courtney Barnett, Bill Callahan, Altın Gün, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, The Lemon Twigs’ Brian D’Addario, White Denim’s James Petralli, Buck Meek, Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle, The Delines’ Willy Vlautin and more, beginning on page 50. There are also reports on fresh stirrings from the Stones, Stevie Nicks, The Cure and Alabama Shakes. All of which, I hope, whets your appetite for new music in 2026. Moving from the future to the past, I’d also like to give a warm welcome to this…

Live God BAD SEED/PIAS 8/10 BALANCED between surrealism and spirituality, introspection and exorcism, Nick Cave’s live show has slowly taken on the cadence and rhythms of a church service. There are the opening hymns of praise and wonder; a middle period of repentance and reflection; then the cleansing release of benediction. Religion has long provided a foundation to Cave’s writing, but those beats were doubled on the Wild God Tour, when the Bad Seeds were joined by a four-piece gospel choir whose wordless backing added a sense of unearthly splendour to Cave’s shamanic pulpiteering. The only thing missing is the incense. Live God is stitched together from several dates on the autumn 2024 European tour to form a representative setlist – albeit missing two of Wild God’s best songs, “Song…

Essam CITY SLANG 8/10 BOTH of the recent recordings of Imarhan’s song “Derhan N’Oulhine” are extraordinary, the differences between them even more so. Indeed, the transformation at hand demonstrates the Algerian group’s bold approach to Tuareg musical traditions, traditions they regard not as fixed and frozen in time and place, but very much part of the present and several possible futures too. Released under the differently Anglicised title of “Dorhan Oullhin”, the song first appeared on Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá, last summer’s instalment of the series of crosscultural musical meetups spearheaded by Damon Albarn. Here, over the plaintive sounds of a single guitar and Albarn’s own piano at the track’s periphery, Imarhan leader Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) sings of a love that stays strong in the face of…

AINSTAYS of Melbourne’s music Mscene who initially formed Essendon Airport as a duo in 1978 before calling time five years later, David Chesworth and Robert Goodge admit the songs on their group’s new album MOR did not necessarily go over well back in the day. Spidery miniatures that were inspired by minimalist composers like Steve Reich and acts at the furthest fringes of prog and krautrock, “these pieces were quite provocative back in 1979 and ’80,” they tell Uncut, speaking collectively as per their practise as musical collaborators. “While we were appreciated by a small and growing audience, many did not get us at all.” They’re understandably pleased these “rigorous minimalist pieces” – which can be heard in their original forms on the 2002 comp Sonic Investigations Of The Trivial…

REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS THERE are no words. Iggy Pop takes a stab in the documentary Rumble, describing the moment he first heard Link Wray’s ferocious instrumental leaking from the PA in a university cafeteria. The impact of the music is hard to describe, so he impersonates the sound. Bam! Bam! Bam! Or perhaps BAAAM! BAAAM! BAAAAM! Taj Mahal takes a different tack, trying to describe not the sound, but the effect. “Rumble”, he says, “made you levitate out of bed about four feet.” Going a stage further, Wayne Kramer of the MC5 turns “Rumble” into a self-help manual, a diktat. Wray’s guitar “embodied all my aspirations,” he says. “It was the sound of freedom.” That’s a lot of freight to load onto a song with…

NAGISA NI TE On The Love Beach/The True Sun/The True World (reissues, 1995, ’98, ’99) FUJI 9/10, 8/10, 9/10 More songs for simple moments IT’S been 30 years since Japanese group Nagisa Ni Te released their first album, On The Love Beach. But the musical history of their notional leader, Shinji Shibayama, stretches back to the early 1980s when, caught up in the feverish energies of the post-punk and DIY movements, he selfreleased a 7” EP, “Picnic In The Night”, under the name Team Spirit. While that single is lost to time – Shibayama doesn’t seem interested in revisiting it – its self-directed energy informs everything he’s done since. Across the ’80s, Shibayama played in groups like Idiot O’Clock and Naoki Zushi Unit, and began his Org Records imprint to…

COURTNEY BARNETT Title: To be confirmed Release date: Spring Recent single “Stay In Your Lane” is indicative of a punchy, hook-driven album, recorded at the home of the Desert Sessions COURTNEY BARNETT: I’ve been living mostly in California for the last few years, so the majority of the new album was written between Joshua Tree and LA. I’m always trying to find some sort of writing routine or structure, but it usually ends up changing. I was moving house constantly in the process of making this album, so it was quite disrupted. But maybe that is my process – to put myself in positions where I never quite feel comfortable. The more time I spend with the album, a lot of it seems to be about change. We recorded at…

“I SEEM to remember buying New York Tendaberry in a secondhand record shop when Lush were touring America. I just felt drawn to it for some reason and was immediately hooked. Then I bought Eli And The Thirteenth Confession. I was going through a bad time with romantic stuff and the lyrics spoke to me about some of that. And just the rawness of it. Even though the lyrics have quite a lot of pain in them, I really loved the imagery she came up with. The New York feel of it. Some of it even borders on Broadway musicals, the way tempos change, the whole pacing of it. “I started writing [the Nyro-referencing] ‘Laura’ soon after. It was one of the last things I did for [Lush debut] Spooky.…

”SWEET PRINCESS” EP IT’S OK, 2018 “She said have you ever spat cum onto the carpet of a Travelodge?” Dry Cleaning’s first, selfreleased EP opened with a series of bold gambits and quotes culled from tabloid headlines, YouTube comments sections and motivational spam: a late-capitalist stream of consciousness stirred into fresh life by Florence Shaw’s sour south London delivery and the band’s rattling, ramshackle post-punk. 8/10 ”BOUNDARY ROAD SNACKS AND DRINKS” EP IT’S OK, 2019 The group’s second EP, named after the band’s Eltham rehearsal space in the bass player’s mum’s garage, proved that Dry Cleaning were no one-joke gimmick. They found fresh poignancy in abandoned fridges, lipgloss applied in pay toilets, and Manchester United gnomes. 7/10 NEW LONG LEG 4AD, 2021 There has never been a band less ethereal…

I HAD become very tired of folk music – it just became too commercial. It didn’t have the same attraction it had for me back in the ’50s. By 1963 I heard The Beatles and thought, ‘Oh man, they’re using folk music chords’ – but they were rock’n’roll and were doing these really interesting harmonies like the Everly Brothers. They were using fourths and fifths. It was very complicated. I just heard that sound and thought, ‘I want to do that!’ rather than playing “On Top Of Old Smokey”. They also looked like they were having a lot of fun – the girls were running after them and that was an attractive thing too. The folk scene was a lot more serious, it had become politicised because of the Vietnam…

IN March 2025, The Damned were readying themselves for a gig in Brazil when Rat Scabies’ phone rang. His heart sank. “As soon as I saw who was calling, I knew it wasn’t going to be good,” he says over coffee in Soho. The caller was Brian James’ wife, Minna. The Damned’s co-founder had died. It was a difficult moment for the three remaining original members of The Damned – Scabies, Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian – who had not long since reunited with James during a series of joyful and long-overdue shows with the songwriter and guitarist in 2022. But it offered them a new direction. At the end of that US tour, the band went into Revolver Studio in Los Angeles to pay tribute to their fallen comrade…

“THEREʼS A GHOST IN MY HOUSE” R DEAN TAYLOR “This one was the choice of our singer. It’s a song Dave had always wanted to do and he did it in two takes. He came back into the control room to a thunderous round of applause from his colleagues.” “SUMMER IN THE CITY” THE LOVINʼ SPOONFUL “This was a song I always really liked. It painted a soundscape of a city in a single song. It’s very clever.” “MAKING TIME” THE CREATION “It’s a riff rocker and very Brian. I can see how that would have got him going back in the day. We always called him the Riff Meister.” “GIMME DANGER” IGGY & THE STOOGES “Brian was a huge MC5 and Stooges man. The first time I met him…

MARTY SUPREME If the Safdie brothers have a major theme, it’s male chutzpah. From Lenny, the dreamy, deadbeat dad in Daddy Longlegs (2009), through Connie, the budding criminal mastermind in Good Time (2017), planning both a heist and a jailbreak over one weekend, to Howard in Uncut Gems (2019), frantically pursuing a lost opal to pay off his gambling debts, their heroes have a shameless, chaotic audacity, flying by the seat of their pants through a Manhattan full of goons, cops, mob lords and long-suffering wives and girlfriends. Though the brothers have now split to pursue their individual paths to glory (Benny delivered The Smashing Machine, a brutal and tender biopic of UFC champ Mark Kerr earlier this year), chutzpah is still the fuel driving their madcap picaresques – and…

ACCORDING to their press material, Mildred is “a freckled, chain-smoking lunchlady with a beautiful tenor”. In reality, Mildred is a quartet of Oakland roommates who fell into playing together, coalesced as a band and whittled down potential names to arrive at an imaginary character they deem to be “our mascot”. It turns out she’s not the only beautiful tenor in this musical marriage of mellow indie and Americana influences. Mildred’s back story is awash with serendipity. Singing guitarists Jack Schrott and Henry Koehler were high-school friends in Portland, Oregon, while bassist Matt Palmquist and drummer Will Fortna have roots in Minneapolis. Fortna and Koehler, meanwhile, discovered that they are related via their grandmothers. “We didn’t even know of each other’s existence until I was in my mid-twenties,” says Fortna. These…

BORN Clifton Blackburn 72 years ago in Chicago, Kahil E’Zabar has been making music for more than 55 years, both as a key member of his home city’s AACM (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and as a session drummer for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone. Since signing to the London label Spiritmuse a few years ago, he’s found a second wind: playing to everyounger audiences, and collaborating with everyounger musicians. “Each generation hears something unique to their moment in history, and a wise elder is cognisant and respectful to this,” he says. “My bandmates are part of the hip-hop generation, and I’ve found myself acquainting myself with that sensibility.” Kahil’sever-mutatingoutfit, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, has been active since 1973, exploring…

III WESTERN VINYL 8/10 FOR a few short years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pullman operated as an odd supergroup featuring members of Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day, Come and Loftus. Those bands had all toured and played together in the 1990s, and this particular side-project allowed the musicians to wander down different musical paths. Instead of heavy guitars, motorik beats and post-rock soundscapes, they trafficked in acoustic picking and strumming, devising a folky palette akin to John Fahey and a contemplative mood often compared (both favourably and unfavourably) to Windham Hill. Before they dispersed back to their dayjob bands, Pullman recorded two albums: the largely acoustic Turnstyles & Junkpiles in 1998 and the more daring Viewfinder in 2001. More than 20 years later, the band – which includes…

WHEN Sugar’s debut album was released in September 1992, it felt like a full-circle moment for frontman Bob Mould. Having exorcised some demons from his decade in Hüsker Dü with a couple of cathartic solo albums, he found inspiration in the bands he had influenced in the first place to produce his grunge-era opus. Copper Blue was an agreeably meaty, eminently tuneful and turbo-charged collection of his most commercial music to date. The Sugar high only lasted for three years, two albums and one EP, with Copper Blue clearly the crown in their catalogue. Mould marked its 20th anniversary at a live celebration with his band of the day, but the time for a Sugar reunion wasn’t right. Now “the long pause” is over with the first sprinkling of new…

ROGER McGuinn: “On the ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ single it was the RWrecking Crew plus me because I had the Rickenbacker riff for the intro and the outro, but after that and [B-side] ‘I Knew I’d Want You’ there were no more studio guys after that. “It was practical because we weren’t really that tight as a band. Michael was just learning to play the drums and we were coming from folk music where strict time isn’t really essential. You can do a slow thing, a fast thing, and move around in different times. But in rock’n’roll you have to keep things tight because people want to dance to it. So we had to learn how to do that. “From a moral point of view, [the other Byrds] hated the fact…

ALTHOUGH Paul Gray didn’t join The Damned until 1980, he did grace the back cover of their debut album. While the front of Damned Damned Damned featured a classic image of the band covered in cream after a Bash Street Kids-style pie fight, 500 copies had a rear photo featuring the Hot Rods instead of The Damned… “There’s a back sleeve photo of the Hot Rods,” says Gray. “We were taking the mick out of Rat. We showed it to Jake Riviera and he and Ed [Hollis, the Hot Rods’ manager] cooked something up – let’s do it as a misprint. It was deliberate. The managers were both great rock’n’roll music fans, full of these great little wheezes. Both bands got on so well, it was a bit of fun.…

ALMOST every musician feels as if they are an outsider, but few have felt it more acutely than Pauline Black – and with good reason. Adopted by a middle-aged white couple and raised as Pauline Vickers, she grew up as the only black girl not just in her family, but in most of Romford. Hoping to find some understanding elsewhere, she moved to Coventry and joined The Selecter, where she discovered what appeared to be a thriving, multiracial musical movement. That worked for a while, but when The Selecter hit the road, she was the only woman on the bus; and her Romford upbringing meant she struggled to fit in with her largely Caribbean-born bandmates. Dealing with difference became the theme of her life and, accordingly, is the focus of…

MEMORY MOTEL The release of Black And Blue Deluxe [reviewed in Uncut, Take 346, Review Of The Year 2025 issue], including a live set from Earls Court in 1976, has brought back a fun recollection and a tear to the eye in memory of my friend Dave. Both huge Stones fans, we snapped up Black And Blue as soon as it was released and geared up to buying tickets for the six Earls Court concerts. That involved applying in a ballot and paying for the tickets with postal orders (!). We were really not sure how lucky we would be. The rumours were that 2 million people applied. Amazingly, we got tickets both for the Sunday (May 23) and Thursday (May 27). We had to go even though it was…

HI Chan! You’re revisiting The Greatest with a full-album tour in 2026. What’s your perspective on that album now? There’s so many memories from that period of my life and the things I was going through. I was 33 when I recorded that. My twenties – I think for most people – it’s just go, survive. But my life changed for the better after that record. That’s the last record that I ever felt that darkness. Until I chose to get sober and confront a lot of things in the backup storage, spiritually and psychologically, I was really not wanting to see myself for who I was. I had maybe believed all the negative things I had been told. That’s the epitome of writing that song: wanting to be the…

‘‘PEOPLE see it as this meteor taking off,” says AAndy Nicholson of the Arctic Monkeys’ astounding rise from spotty Sheffield herberts to becoming the biggest band in Britain over the course of 2005. “And it was amazing, but we were just still four friends within this little tight bubble, doing everything together. I feel like people thought it was all supermodels and champagne, but it was more like ham and cheese and warm beer.” Nicholson’s photos from the time – collected in a new book wryly titled I Bet This Looks Good On Your Coffee Table – show that while the crowds were going crazy out front, behind the scenes the band were working hard to justify the hype, constantly writing new songs in the dressing room or on the…

Forever DRAG CITY 8/10 IT might come across somewhat premature to declare that a group who only released their debut album proper a couple of years ago are bona fide rock’n’roll lifers. But isn’t that, going on all available evidence, exactly what Glyders are? The story goes a bit like this: a boy and a girl – Joshua Condon and Eliza Weber – meet in Chicago through mutual friends, fall for each other hard and, in that first flush of infatuation, decide to start a band. For the next 10 or so years, the pair tour hard, fire out a handful of cassettes on various DIY labels, go through more drummers than Spinal Tap, and gradually, painstakingly hone their sound: a glowing update of boogie-flavoured glam rock’n’roll. This is nothing…

Album of the month East Nashville-based songwriter plugs in on rowdy ninth PRIOR form posits Langhorne Slim as a reflective soul, diarising his life in folk-facing songs wrought from acoustic guitar, piano, banjo and the like. 2021’s Strawberry Mansion was written after his recovery from severe anxiety disorder and prescription drug abuse, lending the album a quickening sense of catharsis and renewal. The follow-up, however, is a whole other beast. For the most part, The Dreamin’ Kind finds Slim – aka Sean Scolnick – switching to electric guitar and fervently rocking out. “It felt like I was blowing some old shit up so I could plant some new flowers,” he reasons. His partners here are Greta Van Fleet’s Sam Kiszka and Daniel Wagner, the former handling production duties and encouraging…

WHEN it came to recording 1985’s A Roomful Of Monkeys, Wreckless Eric was in a good place creatively. True, he had left Stiff Records, and won the Dead, But Won’t Lie Down award in the NME, but his songwriting had matured. “I felt liberated because no-one gave a flying fuck. It’s the best place to be if you want to create something.” Sadly, the record was, Eric says, “half-arsed” because he produced himself and couldn’t get the sound he wanted. “Also, I had a catastrophic drink problem. So I fucked it up.” Now Eric has re-visited the songs on England Screaming, an acerbic reflection of post-Falklands Britain. “The first song, ‘Lifeline’, if it was sited somewhere, it would be in Eastbourne,” Eric says. “My mum used to call it God’s waiting…

SMILE COLUMBIA, 1976 Nyro’s first album since 1971’s all-covers set Gonna Take a Miracle finds her in deeply contemplative mood, from the aching “I Am The Blues” to “Stormy Love” and the imagistic “Children Of The Junks”. 8/10 NESTED COLUMBIA, 1978 Impending motherhood is a recurring theme on this graceful, beautifully measured work that was criminally ignored on initial release. “Mr Blue (Song Of Communications)” posits her as cosmic earth mother; “Springblown” and “The Nest” are radiantly effective. 8/10 MOTHER’S SPIRITUAL COLUMBIA, 1984 After another period of exile, Nyro returns with a newfound sense of surety, navigating mostly laidback songs that address parenthood (“To A Child”), femininity (the title track) and ecological collapse (“A Free Thinker”). 7/10 WALK THE DOG & LIGHT THE LIGHT COLUMBIA, 1993 Another underrated gem, rich…

IT is a crisp, early autumn evening and Dry Cleaning are back in their native environment. That is, holding court in the back of a dingy old man’s pub, deep in the heart of Peckham, south-east London. It’s been a long time. After a slow start, when Covid scuppered their plans to tour their debut album, since lockdown ended the band have made up for lost time, racking up thousands of air miles, performing almost 300 shows, from Japan to Chile. Such an exhausting itinerary even raised the eyebrow of experienced jetsetter Simon Le Bon, who firmly advised them to take a break. On the face of it, Dry Cleaning seem a very unlikely international export. Their surreal and sardonic tales of lost pets, royal weddings and adult education classes,…

AS far back as their first album, Stutter, in 1986, Brian Eno was top of James’ list of dream would-be producers. “Devo. Talking Heads. Bowie… It was like everything he touched was amazing,” explains singer Tim Booth. However, every time James asked, the ambient godfather turned über-producer demurred. Then, in 1992, after fourth album Seven went gold in the UK and spawned the hits “Sound”, “Born Of Frustration” and “Ring The Bells”, they tried again. “I sent Brian some demos and a handwritten letter with my phone number, saying how much I’d loved his ambient music and Talking Heads,” Booth says. “‘We really want to work with you and we’ve tried for the last three albums and you said “no”. Please listen.’” Serendipitously, according to Booth, at around this time…

“PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU” B/W “DON’T BE LONG” Released into an Anglophile world by The Byrds under a pseudonym, The Beefeaters. Mystifying why the cautious, Beatlesy A-side was favoured over the delightful B-side, a high point of the Turn! Turn! Turn! LP when renamed “It Won’t Be Wrong”. US release: October 7, 1964/UK release: January 1965 “MR TAMBOURINE MAN” B/W “I KNEW I’D WANT YOU” McGuinn’s arrangement turns Dylan’s substantial composition into a slinky and succinct psychedelic classic. All mornings should jangle so. US: April 12, 1965/UK: May 15, 1965 “ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO” B/W “I’LL FEEL A WHOLE LOT BETTER” Gene vs Bob! As lovely as their version of the Dylan A-side is, it comes at the expense of a definitive Gene Clark composition on the…

DAMNED DAMNED DAMNED STIFF, 1977 Speed in a can. The rat-a-tat approach of the band’s impeccable debut captures their energy and an ear for melody. “Neat Neat Neat”, “New Rose”, “I Fall” and “Feel The Pain” remain punk classics and the whole record still leaves a smile on the face. 9/10 MUSIC FOR PLEASURE STIFF, 1977 The troubled second begins strongly with “Problem Child” but is more one-dimensional than the debut. “Stretcher Case” and “Idiot Box” are worthy entrants to the catalogue. Saxophonist Lol Coxhill introduces a new side to The Damned on “Your Eyes”. 6/10 MACHINE GUN ETIQUETTE CHISWICK, 1979 The great comeback. After re-forming with Algy Ward on bass, the new lineup cast their net a little wider, introducing prog and psych elements, and delivering memorable boppers on…

HOW to categorise Leonard Cohen? There is much hither and thither in The World Of Leonard Cohen, an academic study of the Canadian Dylan. Did someone say folk-singing personality? Surely he’s a poet? Or a singer-songwriter. Maybe he’s all of these things and none. Shall we stick or twist at bedroom balladeer? The editor, David Shumway – professor of English and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University – opts for an even broader line of enquiry in his opening paragraph (first line: “Who is Leonard Cohen?”). He suggests that the gravel-voiced seducer with the Burberry raincoat “remains a mystery”. Does he? Mystery was certainly part of the Zen priest’s allure. But the debate about categorisation doesn’t get us much further than a reprise of the arguments that took place inside…

BEST BUY EVERSOLO DMP-A10 £3,589 HAVING established itself as a force to be reckoned with in entry-level and mid-range network streamers, Eversolo has set its sights on the high end. The DMP-A10 is its first attempt to crash the party, and it’s fair to say that it’s turned out pretty well. This is a networked audio streamer with digital/analogue conversion and preamp abilities too – but that’s far from the whole story. This Eversolo is specified to match its hefty and businesslike looks, and is ready to deal with any and every realistic eventuality. So it has both LAN and SFP Fiber sockets for connection to your local network, and digital inputs in the shape of two SPDIF sockets, two digital optical inputs plus HDMI ARC and a USB-B. Two…