Essential new releases also including Formal Sppeedwear, Lou Terry, Biita Houdei, Julia Jacklin, Adam Hopper & The Wimps Prayer Tech and The Homesick.
Adult DVD – ‘Adult DVD’
The debut album from Leeds’ Adult DVD encapsulates the band’s ability to channel a sprawl of influences into unrelenting floor-fillers. From the clarion call of opener ‘Do As I Please’, this is an album that refuses to relinquish its hold on the listener. The more direct and anthemic moments of ‘Cold Caller’ and ‘Real Tree Lee’ bring to mind the best of Viagra Boys, while others, like ‘Coffin Dodger’, come closer to Prodigy-style rave. State-of-the-nation fragments spill into surreal flights of imagination while the next synth hook or singalong chorus is never far away. This album lays down the mark as one of the most confident and complete debuts of 2026. It is also a hell of a good time.
Gilla Band – ‘Pugnello’
Lead vocalist and lyricist Dara Kiely’s sliced-up treatises have always carried a sense of aphasia, abandoning a family line’s worth of distorted selves as readily as they push their phrases to a premature end. Likewise, when trembling in moments of quiet or – more rarely – contentment, these silences are self-hating; pools of doubt that pledge a near-liturgical fealty to the threat, or maybe promise, of their transience. Yet written in the wake of Kiely’s schizophrenia diagnosis, ‘Pugnello’ brings the personal detritus of wrestling with a mental illness into even sharper focus. Words still limp across sinuous connections, but their autobiography perforates further. ‘Placeholder’ and ‘The Angelus’ traverse a litany of “comfort vices” that harken back to Kiely’s childhood: a form of distraction, a transportation towards a semblance of innocence. Others tackle darker climes: ‘Alogia’ addresses the diagnosis head-on, stanzas stammering in tribute to the titular poverty of speech, a common product of a schizoaffective disorder. Words become weeping sores across ‘Pugnello,’ but each strand of neurosis is swollen by more than just verbiage. Approached with guitarist Alan Duggan’s recently acquired aptitude for power electronics-infected techno in his work as The Null Club, the LP disrupts the band’s post-punk hegemony with splints of drum machine and modular noise. There may be no immediate comfort in its disturbances, but catharsis undoubtedly reveals itself through the distortion, the word ultimately bound to scathed flesh as it reaches for conclusions that could finally, perhaps, be their own. (Beau Waddell) [Read the full review here]
Formal Sppeedwear – ‘Punch Card’
Formal Sppeedwear’s ‘Punch Card’ is a masterclass in happy accidents. The album is built out of such moments, teased into being by compositional and production improvisation and late nights spent “smashing ideas together until they erode each other and fit more consistently”. This mechanical ideation period would then be followed by hours of meticulously arranging and fleshing out to form some of the most blindsidingly infectious songs you’ll hear all year. The decision to put ’Who Needs Spain Ball’ forward as the lead single must have been one of the easier ones. Beck Clewlow’s twisted yelps punctuate spasmodic bursts of guitar and perforated walls of synth on probably the record’s brightest and hookiest moment. That’s not to say that there’s anything lost when the band deviate from the wily pop tendencies of those songs, though. Late highlight ‘Appointment’ is an anxious marriage of krautrock motifs and otherworldly textures that willingly falls apart and recalibrates itself in a way that recalls label mates Shaking Hand, whilst closer ‘Friedrich Backs Up Nothing’ hums with the sound-manipulated cellos of experimentalist Lili Holland-Fricke. There’s as much to admire when Formal Sppeedwear contort their jittery new wave-isms into something immediate as there is when they keep things decidedly languid. The real charm of ‘Punch Card’ is that it is restlessly creative without ever being pretentious. Sounds are maniacally pulled apart and then slowly stitched back together as the band ask each component part to justify its reinclusion. Truly one of the best records of the year, and one of the best debuts in quite some time. (Marty Hill) [Read the full review here]
Lou Terry – ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Spectacle’
Lou Terry’s latest album reminds us why he is one of the best respected songwriters in London right now. His third full-length captures contemporary life in arresting detail, from Sunday league football drama to fare-dodging on overpriced British trains. At times, the telling is accentuated by pulsing rhythms and soaring hooks, which match the lyrics’ restless energy and elevate the most mundane details to the realm of the profound. On other tracks, particularly ‘Being Human’, the entire band setup is instrumentalised to rise and fall in close step with the emotional tides of the words. Taking a more immediate and hands-on approach to production this time around, Terry seems more fully in command of his sound than ever. His wonky keys part on ‘Scood’ is one of the highlights of the record. Another is the brilliantly written ‘Black Spot of Ash’, which winds around one of the album’s best riffs and manages to fit ‘Cherry Blossom Nivea body cream’ into a song lyric for maybe the first time ever. With more range than ever, reflected by the double-up of the folky dirge ‘Bridge By The River’ and the relentlessly heavy ‘Bolstered’, this is an album that reflects Terry’s continuing appetite for experimentation while showcasing some of his finest songs to date. [Read our Q&A with Lou Terry here]
Biita Houdei – ‘This Bed Was Made For Me’
Lovers of Vashti Bunyan and Fleet Foxes – have you ever yearned to experience the mellifluous euphoria of both artists simultaneously, swirled together like a velvety sundae of gorgeous psych folk confection? If the answer is yes, then Missouri-born, NY-based Biita Houdei has whipped up such a showstopping delight on her debut album ‘This Bed Was Made For Me’, released this month via Basin Rock and Father Daughter Records. Produced by fellow folk whiz Haley Heynderickx and recorded “through tape & warm reverb plates from the 70’s” amidst the bucolic luster of Californian arts haven Topanga Canyon, the record is an enchanting escape from start to finish, brimming with quaint harmonies and sprawling chamber-folk arrangements. Every inch of ‘This Bed Was Made For Me’ is cast in an entrancing golden light that wells softly from the speakers like a soothing balm, pulling you out of whatever latter-day gloom pervades and into the earthly heavens of Houdei’s creation. (Hazel Blacher)
Julia Jacklin – ‘The Gem’
‘The Gem’ embraces a slow journey of self-discovery. Starting again after the release and touring of 2022’s ‘PRE-PLEASURE’, Jacklin is figuring herself back into being in the space that brought her into being all those years ago. The result is rich in personal anecdotes, feelings of isolation, loss, longing and love, and the deep comfort of friendship. ‘The Gem’ was recorded above a Melbourne bar of the same name, which first became a sanctuary for Jacklin when she first moved to the city in 2017. Working within the confines of The Gem, the recording process adapted to fit its environment. Unable to record late into the night and constantly infiltrated by the area’s sonic background, Jacklin embraces an unpolished, experimental and therefore profound quality. ‘The Gem’ is also an album of two halves – loneliness and isolation, paired with hope, willpower and eventual resurrection. Returning to the location that saw Jacklin’s burgeoning career, The Gem once again bears witness to her rebirth. (Grace Palmer) [Read the full review here]
Adam Hopper & the Wimps – ‘Adam Hopper & the Wimps’
None bring uplifting charm and sweetness quite like Adam Hopper & the Wimps. Melodies and singalongs abound across twelve perfectly crafted tunes, from the bouncing, associative ‘Peaches’ to the bedroom majesty of closer ‘I Belong To You’. ‘You Knock Me Down (But In A Good Way)’ has that false impression of simplicity that makes for the best pop lyrics. On ‘Otter’, meanwhile, the fun the band are having serenading the joys and tribulations of the life of the titular creatures radiates self-evidently through your headphones. This record, out via the beloved Bingo Records, is nothing short of start-to-finish jangle pop sweetness.
Prayer Tech – ‘Prayer Tech’
Emboldened by intense ferocity, sincerity and a penchant for pretence, the debut album from London-based trio Prayer Tech is a masterclass of post-hardcore psychedelia. Formed in January 2025 by current and former members of Pozi, KEG, and Blue Bendy, Prayer Tech is a band unencumbered, rife with experimentation, open guitars, and heavy bass riffs. Exploring the malaise of existence and the earnestness of living, this self-titled debut offers an honest reflection of humanity. Muddled in the haze of mundanity, Prayer Tech starkly remind us that the immediacy of heaven is not as accessible as it may seem. The opening track, ‘Raspberry Jam’, cements the desperate anguish that permeates the album. Drawn in by the atmospheric, distant call of “I’ll be there” and an atonal guitar that bends restlessly across the track, ‘Raspberry Jam’ conjures a sense of dislocation – heightened by the uncertain security of the line “just know I am here.” As much as Prayer Tech immerse themselves in the listlessness of the ordinary, their debut boldly embraces the sharply ironic, the witty and satirical. Ending songs like ‘Same Old Fuck’ with the whimsy of saying “goodbye” or the quasi-comical imagery invoked in tracks like ‘Dr Shmagoo / Emperor Slang’, with its call to “abduct the puritans”, introduces a sardonic undertone to the album’s otherwise suffocating intensity. ‘GOTW’ fully embodies this humorously bleak attitude, channelling Getdown Services’ brand of aggravation at humanity’s idiocy. Ultimately, this debut challenges self-assurance, with tracks that revel in their desperation for more beyond the banality of the everyday. (Grace Palmer) [Read the full review here]
The Homesick – ‘What’s Up With All These Shangri-Las’
Dutch trio The Homesick have returned with eccentric, vivid new collection ‘What’s Up With All These Shangri-Las’, their fourth album out now via Vienna based indie Siluh Records. A propulsive, psychotropic excursion of galavanting art-pop acrobatics, every track bursts with all the colour and orderly chaos of an abstract expressionist collage or a slanted, shroomy hallucination. With standout tracks such as ‘John, Calvin and I’, ‘Love Off The Leash’ and ‘Hey’, fans of Animal Collective or Robbing Millions may well find some quirked-up treasures for the autumnal playlist rotation. (Hazel Blacher)
