Since emerging onto the music scene with her dynamic sound and defiantly open songwriting ten years ago, Yumi has been making a name for herself with explosive live shows including festival slots at Manchester Psych Fest, Green Man, Y Not Festival, Kendal Calling, and Shambala. Her music has been featured in the BBC hit drama series ‘Normal People’ and she’s gained support from Lauren Laverne, Guy Garvey, Chris Hawkins, Don Letts, Jack Saunders, Iggy Pop, Tom Ravenscroft, John Kennedy, Clash, The Line Of Best Fit & more.
Following the release of her second full-length album ‘It’s All My In My Head’ last year, Brighton-based artist Yumi And The Weather embark on a nine day tour to promote the forthcoming EP entitled ‘Feed The Wanting’ , which is a collection of songs written this year inspired by life changing events & the seasons which is due for release in October on MIOHMI Records.
Mally Smith is a singer-songwriter from Boston, now living in Edinburgh. Mally’s childhood love of melancholy ballads of the British Isles and the political songs of the American folk-revival fuel her thoughtful and beautifully honest songwriting. Reminiscent of Shawn Colvin, Aoife O’Donovan, and a young Joni Mitchell, Mally combines tasteful guitar and poetic lyrics with a clear voice that will capture your heart. Mally’s forthcoming single “The Dark” hits all streaming platforms this autumn.
Brooklyn-by-Belgium vocalist Charlotte Jacobs transposes her world into music. Sights, movements, sounds and places coalesce, reflecting the artist’s surroundings in lush electronic unison. Born and raised in her parents’ art gallery in a small village in the Flanders countryside, Jacobs’ dense avant-pop arrangements pull influence from visual art, poetry and contemporary dance, converting one artistic medium into another. Her latest EP “The Shape of Wandering” was called “a sonic adventure” (NPR Music), “A musical headfake” (WNYC) and “a book of shadows” (Atwood Magazine).
Joanna Schubert, the Brooklyn-based singer/keyboardist/composer/arranger behind Oropendola, creates kaleidoscopic chamber pop filled to the brim with energy and emotion. Her debut full-length album, Waiting for the Sky to Speak – recorded with Zubin Hensler – was released in March 2023 with Spirit House Records and Wilbur & Moore Records. Her music has been called “expansive and colorful” (Under the Radar Mag), “lovely, ethereal dream pop” (Brooklyn Vegan), and “at the meeting point between arms in the air pop perfection and something altogether more jarring and intriguing” (For the Rabbits). Joanna has also been a touring member of both Half Waif and Barrie, and sung with Grammy-nominated Gnawa musician Samir Langus.
April Jai is a Scottish pop artist currently residing in London. April has released 2 original EPs as well as a stream of singles – including the TikTok viral hit “It Ends With Us” – which has moved April from “the girl with the guitar next door” to “the queen of sad songs”, as referenced by her peers and fans. April’s ability to tug on emotions through her songwriting, combined with her chill pop production style gives her the key to her audience’s heart. Join April and her band for her only Edinburgh headline show of 2023.
London electronic experimentalist Loraine James joins us for an intimate gig-time live performance this October following the release of Gentle Confrontation, her third album for Hyperdub (label home of Burial, Dean Blunt, Laurel Halo).
Breaking the mould of a predominantly white male IDM scene, James’ stunning hybrid sound meshes IDM with R&B, jazz and UK drill and grime influences. It’s chopped and screwed but honest, bare and emotional. With Gentle Confrontation, she lets us into a new chapter of her real and sonic life in which she examines her past and present – a personal and musical leap forward, delivering a totally unique and personal vision of electronic pop music.
She says this is the record a teenage Loraine would like to have made, with musical tendencies that reflect that time, too. It’s a positively languid, enjoyably disjointed set made while listening to her teenage favourites: math rock and emo-electronic such as DNTEL, Lusine, and Telefon Tel Aviv, which drew her back to her adolescence. Featuring an ever more diverse set of peers, the album places them into Loraine’s unusual musical settings and draws out sensitive and reflexive performances. At other times the album stretches out into a drifting ambience as if trying to find a sense of bliss in the everyday.
Visceral yet inherently soulful, ‘Hardly The Same Snake’ is the sound of the Johannesburg-born, Doncaster-raised artist Doya Beardmore finally finding his voice – both literally and figuratively. In practical terms, that involved finding the courage to foreground his gravelly baritone in these gloriously genre-agnostic productions. But it also meant branching out beyond his safety net to figure out the artist he truly wanted to be. As Skinny puts it today, “This album is what I would have created the first time round had I rated my own voice.”
The idea of forging your own path – and shedding skin, so to speak – is integral to ‘Hardly The Same Snake’. Begun pre-pandemic and completed in the spring of 2021, it’s a defiantly outward-looking record contemplating family, religion and major life milestones, from parenthood to death. Where previously Skinny relied on dream diaries as his primary lyrical resource, this time he took notes at design exhibitions, using these unfiltered observations as a jumping off point for songs.
If this superb second album proves anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how much Skinny errs on the side of self-deprecation – he remains one of the UK’s most fearlessly original voices.
Skinny Pelembe’s second album ‘Hardly The Same Snake’ is out on April 28th on Partisan Records.
Chase Petra is a band that exists out of necessity. In other words, within this project, making music is not so much a choice as it is an inherent and inextricable feature of life. ? Their debut album Liminal features quarter-life-crisis pop rock tunes rooted in early 2000s pop punk and indie rock. Meanwhile, the songs’ subject matter runs the gamut, covering everything from issues of social justice (i.e. sexism, classism) to personal growing pains and on to topics of a more nefarious denotation. ? Hailing from Long Beach, CA, Chase Petra is willing to go just about anywhere and try just about anything and they are very much looking forward to the future.
Nell Mescal is a 19-year-old singer and songwriter from Maynooth in Kildare, Ireland. She has been singing all her life and has been performing in groups and choirs for as long as she can remember. This young emerging talent began writing music when she was just 13 years old and finally took the decision to make music her career during the pandemic, something that in hindsight, has given her the time and space to focus on her sound and what she wants to articulate in her songs. Since leaving school, Nell has now moved to North London and found herself surrounded by other young creatives and kindred spirits. Many of whom are helping Nell to discover more about what she’s capable of, are collaborating with her and giving her a thirst for knowledge that will allow her to take creative control of her future as a musician.
Her first official release, ‘Graduating’ effortlessly blends the intimate with the epic, with Nell’s spine-tingling vocal at the forefront. “I wrote Graduating in an hour sitting on my bed in my pyjamas and made a little lo-fi demo. It felt genuinely real and very much me, because I was alone on the piano for that hour, just needing to vent” explains Nell about the birth of the song. “The song is about feeling like you’re supposed to be sad about something but you’re not. Then feeling a little bit angry, I suppose and trying to turn that anger into something a little less all-consuming. Just wishing that some experiences were nicer” says Nell.
Fresh off the back of the release of their new EP ‘Edinburgh Boy – The Colorsound Sessions’ and back with the original 4 person lineup for the first time in over a year, Free Mantle Hypothesis’ set promises to be high-energy with the perfect mix of original music and reimagined classics.
Joined by Edinburgh based Goby and St Andrew’s own Raincheck – this show smashes all the criteria to be a great night.
