What We've Been Listening To This Week...New Releases by The Lounge Society, The Black Lagoons, JW Paris, Alex Rave and the Sceptical, Wreck and the Mards

Links to music / features in blue.

The last seven days or so have been slightly quieter on the new release front in terms of volume of new material coming out, although some excellent stuff has landed from expected and unexpected sources.
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First up, the ever reliable Speedy Wunderground label have delivered the goods again with another massive tune, this time by the Lounge Society with their debut single Generation Game. Generation Game is a bit of an epic, building up at pace with a kind of 60’s/70’s freedom fighter vocal thing going on, with that line ‘What will the U.S. DO?’ properly getting stuck in your head. Marvellous.

JW Paris really caught our attention last year with their single ‘Favourite Thing’ and they’ve just released another quality tune, Royalty. Royalty has a bit of ‘Wind Cries Mary’ Hendrix feel to it, with the band adding a bit of depth to their repertoire. By all accounts there are few more tracks on the way, so hopefully this may mean an EP or more to come in 2020.

Last month we came across the Black Lagoons and their single Best Western. This week they released another new single, All Singers Have Singers For Friends. Their first EP ‘Illusions, Incoherence and Fever’ released in 2018 featured decent 5 garage rock tracks, albeit nothing particularly distinctive, but with this single and its two predecessors Best Western and The Heat the band are carving out a very interesting path for themselves. Its quirky, unconventional and very moreish. The video is a bit nuts too, with some guy doing martial arts moves in a scrap yard.
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We’ve featured a couple of new releases as separate blogs this week, the first of which being the new EP ‘Satisfied’ by Norwich band Wreck. Before Wednesday we’d never heard of them, but they sent through their EP, and we were so impressed that we wrote an article about it that day. You can read about it here, and there’s links to all four tracks, which are all excellent.

​We also featured Manchester based Alex Rave and the Sceptical, who released their fine debut single Itch on Friday. Itch contemplates whether the millennial generation complains because it expects everything to be so good, or is society genuinely harder to live in than it used to be? Its so refreshing to see bands explore these themes, so we thought we’d ask them to expand on these in an interview. Its also a wonderful thing when the answers to your questions are so well articulated by what seems to be a really down to earth bunch of individuals. You can read the interview here.   

Another band from Manchester releasing their debut single on Friday was the Mards. The band take their inspiration from mid 2000's indie bands, such as The Kooks and Arctic Monkeys, as well as pop punk bands like Green Day and Blink 182. ‘Is it better’ comes after a year of bedroom rehearsals and playing gigs in and out of Manchester, and you can hear it here. 

Next week is a big one for new releases….