Ever since the charming audacity of The Magnetic Fields’ 2000 release, 69 Love Songs, frontman Stephin Merritt has struggled to recapture his muse to quite the same effect. Live, they still absolutely smoke – as anyone who has had the pleasure will testify – but studio releases...

What's most refreshing about Dublin's Sounds Of System Breakdown is that they're not out to impress anyone in particular. Their makeup - three lads whose guitars, percussion and electronic bleeps scrap it out for supremacy – would appear to place them in the queue behind the likes of...

Before we make some subtle name changes to freshen up our In The Bag feature (keep an eye out for a chat with Why?'s Josiah Wolf next week), we checked in with one of our under the radar tips for 2009, Glasgow's skewed American indie-pop loving Mitchell Museum to see how their debut album was...

Travelling around Europe late last year supporting Andrew Bird, Tom Waits' favourite nanny Jesca Hoop learned a thing or two and before setting out tomorrow on a UK tour that will take her from Cardiff to Belfast over the next month, she tells Ragged Words what those lessons were.

First Aid Kit are two Swedish teenage sisters, Klara and Johanna Söderberg, who got their break on the strength of a YouTube video of them singing a breathy version of Fleet Foxes’ ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’. The video, performed in a forest, is picture-perfect, and their...

After slaying all before them at last October's CMJ festival, Surfer Blood inched their way up most tipster's cards for '10 but before anyone had a chance to say "don't believe the...", the Florida four-piece released their wholly critically-lauded debut album...

There Is love In You has all of the essential ingredients of a Four Tet album - it whispers and screams in equal measure, builds and collapses, hesitates and struts. The ever-changing rhythmic pulse that beats throughout every Four Tet record is present but four albums in, things feel...

Those who fell jarringly in love with The Guillemots beguiling debut record will know that Fyfe Dangerfield can be a frustrating soul. His tendency to swing between two poles, one manic, one sedate, is also imitated by an infuriating inability to retain consistency across a record. Through the...