Our roundup of the week’s essential new singles, also featuring Babe Rainbow, Holy Wave, Melaina Kol and Upupayāma,

Formal Sppeedwear – ‘Who Needs Spain Ball?’

Some artists are out here asking some of life’s most pertinent questions, and some are Formal Sppeedwear. Positing the query we didn’t know we needed, and giving no attempt at answering it, the Stoke-based trio inhabit their own deliciously absurd and eccentric world of virtuosic new-wave angularity on new single ‘Who Needs Spain Ball?’. Sounding like Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters’ and Eno’s ‘Before And After Science’ – if they were playing Laser Quest, that is – ‘Who Needs Spain Ball?’ condenses a prog rock epic’s worth of ideas into a hook-laden 3 minute rush. Formal Sppeedwear have also announced their debut album ‘Punchcard’ via Melodic Records – due for release 11th September – and take their fucking awesome live show on tour in October. (Elvis Thirlwell)

Gilla Band – ‘Giraffe’

Returning after a few years in the shadows – via guitarist Alan Duggan-Borges excellent side project The Null Club and bassist Daniel Fox’s masses of production work – Irish experimental/noise-rock outfit Gilla Band up the ante with emphatic return single ‘Giraffe’. Having influenced an entire generation of musicians to make horrible, captivating noises with guitars (especially with 2022’s catchy, caterwauling album ‘Most Normal’ and the masses of festival slots that ensued), Gilla Band do the thinkable and push their sound forward even further. Opening with the familiar fare of vocalist Dara Kiely’s wry Mark E. Smith’isms, with wretched rhythm and bruising cadences, the real cherry on this barbed wire cake is the track’s electronic-fizzing outro. It’s daring. It’s explorative. It’s fuck yeah let me listen to whatever album it’s going to be on now. (Elvis Thirlwell)

Babe Rainbow – ‘Polymucalsaccharide’

Whenever a heatwave ensues, there’s a number of things that are guaranteed: barbecues will burn, pebble beaches are likely rammed, Cornettos become impossible to buy, the local off license is filled to the brim with shirtless men. Oh, and Babe Rainbow will inevitably resurface with a new psychedelic scorcher. The Byron Bay rainbow riot’s latest – the not-so-easy-to-say-out-loud ‘Polymucalsaccharide’ – is yet another mango slice of balmy, spacey psych-pop built for breezy beach days sipping cocktail cans. A blissed-out, sun-kissed number that partially evokes Lonerism-era Tame Impala via its kaleidoscopic synth flourishes, the new track is another truly glorious addition to the growing Babe Rainbow canon. The band have also announced their 7th studio album ‘Acid and Honey’ – a pretty good innings for a group who eternally appear so ‘chilled’. (Brad Sked)

Holy Wave – ‘s33.u.in/HAL’

Moving away from the airier psych textures that have long defined their sound, ‘s33.u.in/HAL’ sees Holy Wave descend from the clouds into a robust urban sprawl, senses sharpened and distortion pedals cranked up to the max. The new track from the Nashville group plunges jagged, 90s alt rock guitars into slanted, fuzzed-out shoegaze maximalism à la My Bloody Valentine, all against a slackened trip-hop beat adorned with subtler psych flourishes. Marking the announcement of their new album ‘i’m DADA’ – due 10th July via Suicide Squeeze – it remains to be seen whether this new stylistic iteration is a one-off or permanent fixture, but one thing’s for certain: it rips. “‘s33.u.in/HAL’ is like a prayer to the God of shortcomings, a child God that we are raising to one day be our savior. I was listening to a lot of Wagon Christ at the time and wanted the song to basically be a Wagon Christ rip-off, but it just didn’t feel right,” Holy Wave explain. “So the song was shelved to the ‘maybe the next album’ part of the new song catalog. Then, late in our demoing phase, Joey and Julian showed up to practice with some ideas for it. We played around with them, and the song literally just started to write itself.” (Hazel Blacher)

Melaina Kol – ‘Lifeheart’

If the brain were a garden – synapses aglow in a polychrome flora of squishy matter, glistering through memories at one hundred miles an hour – it might sound a little bit like Melaina Kol’s ‘Lifeheart’. A rich melodic core gilded with musing, refractive experimentalism, labyrinthine finger-picked guitars enmesh with choppy vocal samples in a soaring brush with tenderness and emotional catharsis. The breathtaking new track from Melaina Kol – aka Logan Hornyak, a cult figure in the Nashville grassroots scene – arrives alongside an announcement of his signing to Philly tastemaker label Julia’s War, and also serves as the first taster from upcoming new album ‘Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then’, due for release in August. “I spend a lot of time playing guitar and am obsessed with two dueling guitar parts that are completely different but serve to accomplish a uniform sound,” Kol explains. “The rest of the instrumental comes from some pedal stuff, and I was able to record harp in a studio my roommate works at”. (Hazel Blacher)

Upupayāma – ‘Baobab’

Italian multi-instrumentalist maestro Upupayāma – aka the moniker of Alessio Ferarri – has shared ‘Baobab’ the fourth single from their new album ‘Honestly Flowers’, out today via the ever forward-thinking Fuzz Club Records. While previous outings from the latest record have channelled the likes of Goat, 3-minute melter ‘Baobab’ pivots into the acid-psych folk stylings of the wonderful (and sadly now-departed) Kikagaku Moyo, fused with flourishes of psychedelic-cumbia recalling early Los Bitchos. It’s the perfect psychedelic freakout for the blistering heat soup that we’ve found ourselves melting in this week. (Brad Sked)