We are delighted to report that our feisty New Zealand friends Pieces Of Molly have once again triumphed in our Tracks Of The Week contest, earning themselves a place in the pantheon of rock immortality with a comprehensive victory over These Wicked Rivers and Bywater Call. We’re putting it down to all the meat in the video.
So congratulations to them. And then up it’s Up! Up! And away! As we begin a new contest. Listen hard, vote harder.
Airbourne – Kid In A Candy Store
The latest slice of the Aussie’s long-awaited new album, Kid In A Candy Store is a pensive, understated affair with a surprise acoustic twist… just kidding: it’s AC/DC-baked raunch and balls-to-the-wall boogieing from start to finish, audibly draped in the same torn black denim and tourbus-fresh locks they’ve had since about 2003. It kinda puts us in the mind of their first couple of albums, channeling that same fury and road-dog work ethic. Have you heard it all before, and then some? Yes. Does that really matter? No. Sure to be a blast live.
The Heat Inc – Mind Control
London rock’n’rollers The Heat Inc cook up a haunting yet headbanging swirl of alt/goth 80s flavours and guitar fuzz, without feeling like a mindless throwback – quite the contrary. “This is a long way from being our first rodeo and God knows, we’ve never done it for the money,” they say. “We do it because we love it. There is no other way.” You can hear all that in Mind Control, and it feels all the more strident for it.
The Sheepdogs – Bad For Your Health
Riding the waves of this year’s Keep Out Of The Storm, the Canadian canines have released this gorgeous live version of one of its highlights – the lush yet rocking Bad For Your Health. All glam grooves, vintage threads and warmly toned riffage, it’s both beautifully laidback and the sort of rock’n’roller you can’t help but move to. Good health is overrated anyway, right? Catch them live in the UK this November and December.
The Anchoress – Throw Over Your Man
Enigma, auteur and progressive musical mastermind behind The Anchoress, Catherine Anne Davies is joined by James Dean Bradfield on guitar for this sumptuous taste of her next album, As We Once Were. Billed by Davies as a “celebratory queer rock anthem,” it mixes driving alt, classic rock and folk notes with sensual storytelling in one absorbing cocktail. If Virginia Woolf wrote rock songs instead of novels, having listened to a load of Fleetwood Mac and Kate Bush, she might have come up with this.
The Virginmarys – My Nettle
A fiery, urgent highlight from 2024’s excellent The House Beyond The Fires, My Nettle packs a different kind of punch on this stripped-back rendition. An elegantly desolate slow burner, its bare-bones piano core expands through percussive beats and subtle, stirring string layers into something quietly lush, even as it bristles with raw feeling. Better than the original? No. A thoughtful, compelling sojourn from their fully electric set? Absolutely.
The Temperance Movement – Eat You Alive
Last year these guys reunited for their first shows since before the pandemic. Now, the fruits of that reunion further reveal themselves with this raw, rollicking taste of an all-new studio album, due later this year. Mixing analogue-y Black Crowes-come-Creedence spittle and sugar with classic British rock’n’roll, it’s a sun-dappled opening shot of this next chapter. Sonically not unlike Midnight Black (from their acclaimed debut), but with a sweetly roughened shadow.
Stanley Simmons – Don’t Leave Me Here Like That
Stanley Simmons continue to carve out a niche that’s deliciously distant from their dads, with fifth single Don’t Leave Me Here Like That coming on like Simon & Garfunkel playing a long-lost Tom Petty tune. Or like UK indie verterans Dodgy, with an effervescent, summery vibe, and some 80s pop thrown in for good measure. The duo’s debut LP will be released on August 28, with tour dates following in September and October.
The Band Feel – Summer Song
St. Louis retro-rockers The Band Feel continue their musical mission, which is apparently to pretend that disco and punk and everything that followed never actually followed, and that one can journey safely from 1974 to 2026 without any pesky musical interference whatsoever. Summer Song is exactly as described on the packaging, sounding as if it were created on a hazy July 1974 evening in Laurel Canyon, with the right amount of lightness and whimsy. Debut album What Of Now will be available at your nearest hippie emporium from August 21.
(LouderSound)
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