Listen - MGMT - MGMT - Full Album

MGMT is the self titled, third studio album from Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. The successor to 2008’s Oracular Spectacular and 2010’s Congratulations, MGMT sees the band continuing to push themselves to expand the boundaries of modern pop music. The result is a diverse and powerful collection of 10 songs that directly mirrors the duo’s encompassing surrealist view of the everyday.

The album is accompanied by ‘the Optimizer’, providing listeners of the album with a simultaneously aural and optical listening experience including exclusive video footage and CGI work.

Watch - Arcade Fire - Reflektor - Official video

Listen - Arctic Monkeys - AM - Full Album

‘AM’ was produced by James Ford and co-produced by Ross Orton at Sage & Sound Recording, LA and Rancho De La Luna, Joshua Tree. The album was engineered by Ian Shea and mixed by Tchad Blake. 

Josh Homme, Pete Thomas and Bill Ryder-Jones all make guest appearances on ‘AM’ – as do the words of John Cooper Clarke, on the track I Wanna Be Yours.

Listen - Babyshambles - Sequel to the Prequel - Full Album

Filled with hooks and humour, the album features some of the band’s finest ever lyrics ranging from the tender to the downright hilarious. Musically it has already been called their most accomplished and collaborative work to date. 

As Peter Doherty told the NME recently, “I don’t want this to be half arsed, I want to get up there and really fu*king smash it out. Babyshambles aren’t back, this band has always been here”.

Listen - Crystal Stilts - Nature Noir - Full Album

Recorded in the damp spring of 2013, this newest disc finds the group expanding their palette to include strings, percussion, and synthesizers, to create a record that is both more sonically adventurous and a more personal and humane statement than their previous work. On tracks such as "Star Crawl" and "Sticks and Stones", Hargett's vocals have a striking clarity and soulfulness, while the musical arrangements throughout display a sophistication that may be surprising to those who previously thought of the band as "lo-fi". Meanwhile, album opener "Spirit in Front of Me" and the ripping "Future Folklore" showcase the psychedelic grit that has long been a trademark sound.

Listen - Franz Ferdinand - Right Thoughts Right Words Right Action - Full Album

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, the fourth studio album by Franz Ferdinand, will be released by Domino on 26th August 2013.

This exuberant, unencumbered record is the first from the Glasgow band since 2009’s Tonight. They seem to have rediscovered the imagination, vitality and fun found on their classic, era-encapsulating debut Franz Ferdinand.

Recorded over the last year at Kapranos’s Scottish studio and McCarthy’s Sausage Studios in London, the LP cements their status as a unique and adventurous British band: emboldened by a decade’s undreamt-of worldwide success, but still daring and defiant. It’s an ecstatic rejection of the drab conventions often accompanying that level of attention and expectation.

When asked for a quote, Kapranos came back with: “The Intellect Vs The Soul, played out by some dumb band.”* God knows what that means, but the lyrics do seem more poetic this time. There were a few interesting collaborations, but more of that later…

The ten songs that make up Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action take what propelled Franz Ferdinand from the incestuous Glasgow Art School world to, well, the entire world - painterly lyrical detail, heavyweight hooks, precise aesthetic vision and that uncanny ability to marry arch artistic sensibility with pop punch – and push it even further. The breadth of influence, musicality and invention on show here is enormous. If this is unmistakably a Franz Ferdinand record, it is as much by virtue of its sonic daring and perfectly patch-worked eclecticism as the timeless songwriting flair that has long been their calling card.

Franz Ferdinand are still Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson. There’s still no one like them.

Watch - These New Puritans - Organ Eternal - Official video