Glass Museum announce new album, 4N4LOG CITY, and share new single ‘Call Me Names’

Back in April, Glass Museum released a brand new track, ‘GATE 1’, their first new music since their album Reflet came out in 2022. The Brussels outfit have now followed up with a second track, ‘Call Me Names’, featuring vocals for the very first time. Weaving themes of breakup, regret, and reconciliation, the new track “explores the void left by another, the difficulty of confronting one’s own mistakes, and the desire to turn back time”, as the press release describes.

Alongside the single, the band have announced their much-anticipated new album. Entitled 4N4LOG CITY, the new record sees the duo of keyboardist Antoine Flipo and drummer Martin Grégoire evolve into a trio with the addition of bassist Issam Labbene. 4N4LOG CITY also brings together a host of guest appearances from vocalist JDS, Swiss drummer Arthur Hnatek and rapper JAZZ BRAK of STIKSTOF.

Like the singles that precede it, the album exudes an atmosphere that mirrors the rhythm of urban life, “captur[ing] the mechanical ebb and flow beneath concrete towers—the anonymous rhythms of daily life moving over the asphalt, and the fleeting, meaningful connections made along the way.”

4N4LOG CITY is set for release on September 19th through Sdban Ultra. Mark your calendars and check out ‘Call Me Names’, offered with an accompanying video directed by Super Tchip, documenting the creation of a graffiti mural in Anderlecht (Brussels), painted by visual artists Manon Brûlé and Nora Juncker. Now part of the streetscape in Anderlecht, the mural echoes ‘Call Me Names’ in form and feeling, a meeting point between music and street art that lingers in the city’s memory. Check out the video below.

Blue Earth Sound shares second single, ‘Lover’s Rock’, from upcoming LP Cicero Nights

Ahead of the release of Cicero Nights, James Weir’s Blue Earth Sound has unleashed a new track, ‘Lover’s Rock’,  following lead single ‘Mariposa‘ released last month. Cicero Nights was recorded at the International Anthem studio space in Chicago with in-house engineer Dave Vettraino, and as we had mentioned, the multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and composer assembled a stellar cast of collaborators including drummer Patch Romanowski, Resavoir’s Will Miller on trumpet, flautist Eamonn Pritzy, and longtime collaborator Michael Wells. Also featuring percussion from guest contributors Cabeza De Chivo’s Alex Aguero and Destroyer’s Joshua Wells, ‘Lover’s Rock’ captures the collaborative energy of the project. With inspiration drawn from the cinematic soul of Isaac Hayes and the vibrant rhythms of Latin America, ‘Lover’s Rock’ is a feel-good, celestial track. Listen to it below and grab the album when it drops on September 12th through Root Records.

Jørgen Træen & Stein Urheim share first single from upcoming album Galant Galakse

Four years on from their Edvard Prize-winning debut Krympende Klode, producer/composer Jørgen Træen and guitarist/composer Stein Urheim return with a new album titled Galant Galakse. Træen, known for his adventurous studio work as Sir Dupermann and collaborations across countless genres, meets Urheim’s rich palette of folk, blues, and global traditions with a playful, exploratory spirit. The two have crossed paths in various configurations over the years, producing, mixing and guesting, but their work as a duo lands somewhere else entirely. Grounded in a shared fascination for the outer edges of acoustic and electronic music, their long-running collaboration continues to draw on global string instruments, modular synths, and a mutual love of pioneers like Harry Partch, Raymond Scott and Delia Derbyshire. On the upcoming Galant Galakse, the Norwegian pair explore the fertile ground where experimental electronics and acoustic sound worlds collide, filtered through a singular Scandinavian lens.

Galant Galakse arrives on August 22nd through Action Jazz and they are enticing us with the first single, the warm and cosmic ‘Entrance/Exit’. Take a listen now.

Herbert & Momoko tease upcoming album, Clay, with third single ‘Someone Like You’

Released last week, ‘Someone Like You’ is the third stunning single lifted from Herbert & Momoko‘s upcoming first full-length album together, Clay, following ‘Babystar‘ and ‘Need To Run’. Speaking about the track, Momoko shares:

“As children we can enter a state of flow or contentment quite easily; Climbing a tree, playing a game, reading in the sun… there’s a self-contained wholeness to those times. We can’t find the love that’s beyond the pendulum swings of adolescent love without learning to let someone in, to become vulnerable, to let someone change you. It’s a choice to seek wholeness with another, and understanding interdependency, not just with people but with everything, is one of the most rewarding quests in life. In this song there is a yearning both to learn this interdependency as well as to remember the simpler contentment of being a child.”

Listen to ‘Someone Like You’ below.

Theon Cross announces new live album, Affirmations: Live at Blue Note New York

Theon Cross has announced Affirmations: Live at Blue Note New York, a new live album arriving on July 11th through New Soil and Division 81. Recorded during his debut US headline show at the iconic Blue Note, the album captures Cross leading a transatlantic quartet featuring Chicago’s Isaiah Collier on sax, James Russell Sims on drums, and long-time London collaborator Nikos Ziarkas on guitar. Cross has been a key figure in London’s jazz resurgence for years, collaborating with the likes of Sons of Kemet, Steam Down, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Makaya McCraven, Jon Baptiste, and many more. The 12-track album draws heavily from previous releases, 2019’s Fyah and 2021’s Intra-I, and the 2022 single ‘Wings’, but nothing is played straight, everything is reworked in the moment, and stretched into new shapes by the energy in the room. Even his version of Aswad’s ‘Back to Africa’, originally the B-side to ‘Wings’, finds its way into the flow. Structured more like a DJ set than a traditional jazz performance, Affirmations moves with fluid energy, sitting in the lineage of live classics recorded at Blue Note but with a foot firmly planted in the present.

Ahead of the album’s release, Cross has shared the lead single, ‘Affirmations’, a 14-minute slow-build epic that stretches and contracts like a living thing. As Cross puts it, the track “speaks to the power of verbally and mentally affirming the things we wish to see for ourselves in our reality.” Listen to ‘Affirmations’ now.

Cate Le Bon set to release new record, Michelangelo Dying, in September

Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon has announced the release of Michelangelo Dying, her seventh album and follow-up to 2022’s Pompeii. Written in the thick of heartbreak, what began as one thing became another. “Its creation led by pure emotion,” says the press release. “The product of all-consuming heartache… it became a kind of exorcism.” Michelangelo Dying moves in cycles, without conclusion. “There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos,” Le Bon explains. “I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it..”

The album was recorded between Hydra, Cardiff, London, Los Angeles, and the California desert, with Samur Khouja sharing production duties. Le Bon credits him with helping her get lost in the process while staying anchored. She comments:

“There’s this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you’ll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio.”

We’ll have to wait until September 26th for the album to be out through Mexican Summer but we can already hear the first single, ‘Heaven Is No Feeling’,  offered alongside an accompanying video directed by longtime collaborator H. Hawkline. He had this to say about it:

“There are moments in life you can’t make up, that seem unfathomable, then they happen. Life calls you on a banana phone and tells you her oldest joke, everybody crowds around and you try to remember the words to your favourite song. If you were to ask me how we made this video, I couldn’t tell you. Cate watching her, watching her watching Cate. I will always feel honoured to work with Cate in whatever shape or form, it’s easy to forget how remarkable someone is when you’ve known them forever. ‘I want you to make me a new video.’ ‘Have you watched the old one yet?’ ‘No’ …Bravo!’”

Watch the video below.