See the end of the post for the Weekly Playlist featuring all the tracks I loved this week.
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Baxter Dury
Allbarone
I’ve always had a soft spot for Baxter Dury’s lounge lizard music, but have often found his more upbeat work more resonant.
‘Allbarone’ is a sleazy square-wave synth banger made, as the album was with Paul Epworth. I love that the title sounds like some exotic place underscored by the video shot in Venice, when in reality, it’s a franchise cocktail bar in the UK.
It’s a song about sitting in the rain outside an All Bar One contemplating why what just happened, happened in the way it did.”
Allbarone is the title song from a forthcoming album of the same name, his ninth, to be released on Heavenly Recordings on 12 September 2025.
Alongside his All Together Now Festival set this July, Baxter Dury plays two shows in Dublin and Belfast this November.
Billy Woods, Despot, El-P
Corinthians
The rap auteur is back to reclaim the crown as one of the best MCs in the genre. Woods has been on a roll of great albums, whether solo (2022’s Aethiopes really struck with me) or with collaborators Kenny Segal and ELUCID as Armand Hammer.
GOLLIWOG is an album consumed by themes of horror but not the clichéd boogieman of cult films, but the everyday sulphur of our modern living, and the pain we inflict on each other in the grim everyday.
‘Corinthians’ is just one snippet of that rich evocative bleakness that Woods excels at, with pulsating synth drones and references “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip”, and comes full circle with Woods’ closest dystopian rap forebearers through production from El-P and a verse from Def Jux alumni Despot.
GOLLIWOG might be Woods’ most complete album yet. More on that soon.
MIKE
#71
MIKE and Tony Seltzer released a Pinball II, a follow up Pinball from March last year finds the New York MC and producer pairing making rap bangers in a mixtape format.
‘#71’ is a woozy rap cut dipped in house piano and dance atmospherics, and like much of the mixtape doesn’t stick around for long.
Fiona Apple
Pretrail (Let Her Go Home)
Fiona Apple’s first track in five years since the release of Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a protest song, which addresses the disproportionate plight of Black mothers who unable to afford bail for a small misdemeanour who are locked up by the unwieldy American justice system, traumatising and breaking apart their entir lives (and their family’s) at the doorstep of bureaucracy.
Apple spent time observing bail hearings for Courtwatch PG and drew on that experience. Apple said:
Time and time again, I listened as people were taken away and put in jail, for no other reason than that they couldn’t afford to buy their way free. It was particularly hard to hear mothers and caretakers get taken away from the people who depend on them. For the past five years, I have been volunteering with the Free Black Mamas DMV bailout, and I have been lucky to be able to witness the stories of women who fought for and won their freedom with the tireless and loving support of the leadership. I hope that this song, and the images shared with me, can help to show what is at stake when someone is kept in pretrial detention. I give this song in friendship and respect to all who have experienced the pain of pretrial detention and to the women of the group’s leadership who have taught me so much and whom I truly love.
Apple also launched Let Her Go Home website where you can donate and learn more about the issue.
Roosevelt
Automatic – Midnight Version
The German musician Marius Lauber’s Roosevelt project has never strayed far from sophisticated shiny synth pop with touches of Italo, and his Midnight versions amp up the dynamics for the dancefloor.
This new version of ‘Automatic’ definitely does that with aplomb – and conjurs up a mirage of a sun-soaked blue-hued pool waiting for you to divebomb into.
Songs I also loved this week:
Also added to this week’s playlist:
- Frankie Cosmos – Bitch Heart
- Annie and the Caldwells; Justin Strauss – I Made It – A Justin Strauss Production
- Cain – Morrigan
- Nourished by Time – Max Potential
- Loyle Carner – about time
- Falle Nioke – Falle Le Le Le
- Divine Earth; Princess Nokia – More Light (feat. Princess Nokia)
- Joe Goddard; Technology + Teamwork – Buffy
- Little Simz – Young
- DIDI HAN – Youth
Nialler9 Weekly Playlist
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Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.