With Billy Woods, Stereolab, Smerz, M(h)aol, Léa Sen, Curtisy, Laura Duff and more.
An overview of my recommended albums for listening from the month of May.
As ever, I’m always listening through a big list of releases that is neverending.
The albums below are the ones that have resonated the most from the month so far.
Album of the month:
Billy Woods – Golliwog
The Washington DC-based New York artist rap auteur has been on a roll of great albums in recent years, whether solo (2022’s Aethiopes really struck with me), or with collaborators Kenny Segal (2023’s Maps was a highlight) and ELUCID as Armand Hammer. GOLLIWOG might be his most singularly brilliant album yet.
GOLLIWOG is an album consumed by themes of horror – not the clichéd boogiemen of cult films, but the everyday corrosive effect of modern living, and the pain we inflict on each other in the grim everyday.
It’s at times suffocating in its sulphuric atmosphere, but that’s part of the appeal, with Woods spouting free-wheelin’ rhymes that draw on the stuff of nightmares and unsettling vignettes set to eerie dank productions, broken jazz beats, sinister basslines, sampled speech and synth horror score atmosphere.
Production comes from a coterie of names like The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, DJ Hara and Saint Abdullah.
We already knew few rappers could make albums like Billy Woods, but GOLLIWOG is a new apex in his discography of evocative albums, swimming in the mire of humanity’s worst impulses.
Billy Woods is playing Dublin in October.
Stereolab – Instant Holograms On Metal Film
The cult indie synth-pop band’s first album in 15 years sounds like everything a fan of Stereolab would want to hear – the band’s typically bright and melodic synth pop French chanson style across an hour’s of music.
It will make you want to go back and listen to Dots & Loops, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and the band’s rich discography (complimentary), with its retro futuristic warm-toned krautrock-indebted avant-pop.
Smerz – Big city life
The Norwegian electronic duo smerz’s second album is rooted firmly on an arch art-pop vibe, with woozy tracks drawing from electro, R&B, synth-pop, DIY pop, minimal, trance and casually spoken-sung vocal styles.
When Smerz release music I am always interested in hearing what they’re putting down, and there’s a wide variation of sound and tones drawn from on Big city life that is drawing me back for more.
M(h)aol – Something Soft
The Irish post-punk band based in Dublin, Belfast, and London releases their second album on Merge Records. Something Soft is a a collection of razor-sharp visceral punk songs that mostly let the noise do the shaking, with Constance Keane’s vocals (and Jamie Hyland) adding subtle meaning to the band’s elemental fury.
Erika de Casier – Lifetime
The Swedish alt-pop singer and producer released a surprise album Lifetime on her own label Independent Jeep Music, that explores early 90s R&B sounds and trip-hop in a glossy vocal fashion. It’s a record full of vibey songs like ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ a pop hook-filled Enigma-channeling new agey pop highlight.
The album had the working title of Midnight Caller which helps set the vibe.
Curtisy, hikii – Beauty In The Beast
Beauty In The Beast is the follow up release from last year’s critically-acclaimed Irish album of the year nominee, and Nialler9 chart-topper What Was The Question from the Jobstown rapper.
Beauty In The Beast was produced by hikii who made some of the beats on Curtisy’s debut record and the artist said the mixtape “is about finding hope in the hopelessness”.
It’s early days yet for this mixtape but I can see this being seen as a fulcrum for the future of Curtisy’s work, with the artists trying on different styles and moods in a relaxed mixtape setting that suggest there’s much more variety to come from the lad.
Léa Sen – Levels
The debut album on Partisan Records from a French London based singer-songwriter and producer Léa Sen.
Levels does indeed play out as stated as an “surreal, liminal hotel where each room holds a different chapter of her life”, the record plays with the tension between reality and dreamlike abstraction.”
There’s an abstract dreamlike quality to these songs – with Léa Sen’s expressive voice the totem throughout the record of ever-shifting songs of experimental pop, R&B and trip-hop guitar confessionals.
MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball II
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.
Laura Duff – Sea Legs
Limerick songwriter and musician Laura Duff releases a debut album of introspective songwriting drawing from experiences of grief at the passing of her father and draws from good memories and experiences of being by the sea. At times, it’s devastating in how it plaintively underscores parental loss through simple recollections and the gulf of experience between then and now.
Romance – Love Is Colder Than Death
The album channels the existential dread and surreal detachment of haunted Los Angeles, the hot dry Santa Anas winds rattling through mountain passes – a world where, ‘no one is what they seem, and nothing is what it should be.’
Other Albums I’m enjoying this month.
- Aesop Rock – Black Hole Superette
- Dysania – An Lá Ba
- Lil Skag – Type Shite EP
- Lael Neale – Altogether Stranger
- NewDad – Safe EP
- Search Results – Go Mutant
What albums are you enjoying? Join our Discord community with a Patreon membership and discuss albums with us.
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.
