Category Archives: Blog

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

13 June 2025

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’

13 June 2025

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

12 June 2025

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

07 June 2025

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.

Mansur Brown announces new album, Rihla, and drops first single ‘Alone’

05 June 2025

Photo: Greg Barnes

We’ve been following Mansur Brown since his early days in the London jazz scene, and there’s big news, the Brixton-born guitarist, producer, and composer has just announced his eagerly awaited new album, Rihla. Described as his most personal record to date, on Rihla Brown blends his signature guitar virtuosity with electronic, rock, and DnB influences, all while introducing his own vocals for the first time.  A word that translates to journey in Arabic, Rihla is exactly that, a voyage through musical landscapes that are uniquely his. The album carries a range of moods, from uplifting to introspective, as Brown explains:

“My music has many different feelings, but running through all of it are senses of happiness, and gratitude. I want it to feel rejuvenating.”

Written, performed, and produced entirely by himself, Rihla arrives on August 1st through his own label AMAI. Ahead of it, Brown has shared the album’s lead single, ‘Alone’, a reflective track about self-esteem and the struggle for self-acceptance. Speaking about it, he says:

“Alone is about a friend who struggles with internal self esteem issues and the need for external validation. The song talks about the constant inward battle of wanting to be better but not believing that it’s possible. It describes the difficulty of self actualisation and how that can only be achieved when you’re comfortable in your own skin i.e. being Alone. This all ties into the journey that we need to go on.”

‘Alone’ comes with an accompanying video and you can watch it below.

In other exciting news, Mansur Brown has a couple of live shows lined up – catch him in Porto at Matosinhos em Jazz on July 5th and in London at Scala on October 7th.

Watch Grandbrothers’ video for lead single ‘We Collide’

03 June 2025

Last month, Grandbrothers announced the release of their new album Elsewhere, alongside the first single ‘We Collide’. Now the German-Swiss duo have paired the track with an accompanying video directed by Austrian filmmaker Rupert Höller, who had this to say about it:

“The hypnotic pull and the powerful use of repetition in ‘We Collide’ fascinated me from the very first listen. My goal was to make that feeling – the chaos of an inner storm – tangible through abstract imagery, creating a visual journey from disorientation to acceptance.”

Grandbrothers’ pianist Erol Sarp also shared his thoughts on the video:

“What we really appreciate about Rupert’s take is how naturally he picked up on the energy and movement of the track. He really understood what we were going for – the dynamics, the transitions, that inner tension building slowly throughout. And he found a visual language that translates the energy of the music into motion.”

Watch the video below and watch out for the album’s release on September 26th through __and__others.