What We've Been Listening To This Week...IDLES, Squid, Bilk, Courting, Kooba Tercu and the Owed Summer, Stay Home and Group Therapy Compilations

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This week has mostly been spent listening to three great compilation albums -  Owed Summer from Joint Effort / Sour Grapes Records, Stay Home from Independent Musicians Against COVID19 (which you can read about here and Group Therapy Vol 1 (which you can read about here). Profits from all three compilations (120 tracks across all of them!) will be donated to NHS charities as well as music charities so you get to help some very worthwhile causes as well as get some great music added to your Bandcamp collections.

Another album that really merits talking about is Proto Tekno by Kooba Tercu, released on Friday by Rocket Recordings. I won’t go into too much details as you can read about it here, but it is rather special and already a contender for album of the year.

On the singles front we profiled the new single by Courting and had an interview with front man Sean yesterday which you can read about here. Needless to say, ‘David Byrne’s Bad Side’ is yet another top tune from the band that bought us ‘Football’ earlier this year. Another promising young band Bilk released a new single I got knocked out the same night as England, which sees them returning to their punky roots with great effect.

Possibly one of the most keenly anticipated new singles of the week was ‘Mr Motivator’ from IDLES, the lead track from their forthcoming album. Judging by some of the comments on one of the IDLES Facebook groups, opinions of the song have been split, with some loving it and others dismissive. Comments from the detractors included a suggestion that the song is a pastiche of the band, that it’s got a ‘crap chorus’ and so on.  Personally, I think it’s superb, a real rabble rouser, full of energy and a great taster for the album, although I've only started getting into the band over the last year or so. We also had an interview with Mark Bowen of the band last week, talking about in how he’s finding life in Lockdown, which you can read here.

Last but not least on the new releases front is the new single from Squid, Broadcaster. Broadcaster reveals a more electronic, experimental side to the band, perhaps giving some indication of why they signed recently to Warp Records. It’s very good though. Broadcaster is to be released on 10-inch vinyl, with previous digital single release Sludge at the end of the month. We’ll have to wait until sometime next year for their debut album though.