Pop

For fans of harmonies and power pop, the debut album from Portable Radio is the natural heir to the Beach Boys when they had beards, The Zombies, Carole King, Bee Gees, Weyes Blood, Drugdealer, Hall & Oates and all that solid gold pop we love!

It's worth pointing out that our very own Mof is in the band, but we're not being biased, honest! Limited run, so don't hang about for this!

Just a year after picking up instruments and forming Sheffield band Potpourri release their debut album, First Dance. Potpourri formed in Summer 2019 to play a gig at the inaugural Bingo Fest, and have been cultivating their off-kilter brand of pop since - incorporating the Broadcast-esque electronic sounds, motorik rhythms and chanteuse-style vocal harmonies.

Cream vinyl includes zine.

The latest from Do Your Best comes from Manchester's Another; Country $$$$ with their album 'GRIEF STRICKEN LISTED BUILDINGS'.

The album ceaselessly melds the warped, the gritty and the shiny to form a blissful space where beauty is simultaneous with uncertainty.

With beautiful and exclusive new artwork from NGA D'Grayt (@nga_dgrayt) both inside and out, the album is presented on a luscious transparent red cassette.

Barcelona-based singer-songwriter and Slow Dance signee Uma releases debut EP ‘Bel-li’, via “the collective at the cutting edge of London’s live music scene” (Dazed), Slow Dance, (the likes of Black Midi, Jockstrap, Sorry, Goat Girl, PVA, Squid and more).

‘Bel-li’ is composed of five tracks, emphasising Uma’s intensely interpersonal and deep connection with music and lyricism. “Writing for me is my way of processing and expressing the world around me and the experiences I’ve gone through. I feel a lot for the people I’m surrounded with and the issues I really care about, such as mental health and the under-representation of females within the music industry.

These tracks, though accessible in their listenability, blur the lines of traditional genres, as Uma focuses on the beauty and versatility of sound. The use of classical arrangements and Spanish guitar are a beautiful echo of her roots and upbringing. At the heart of these releases lie a sense of raw humanity and honesty. With arduous intensity, she expresses: “It is all about home and falling into a great love. Late night bowls of spaghetti in your belly. Endless summers watching the sunset from my roof. Imminent tragedy and inescapable melancholy.”

Good time music alert. If Janet Planet, Sugar Bones, Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild weren’t a band already you’d be snapping at their heels demanding they form one quick-sharp. Fact is, they are, and they release Confident Music For Confident People, their 11-track debut album for Heavenly Recordings.

Confident Music For Confident People is a big pop album that hints at Dee-lite, LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads and The Avalanches. Standout tracks Boyfriend, Bubblegum and Better Sit Down Boy are big and brash and bright as hell, like Dee-Lite tooled up and ready for our berserk modern times. Here is a set of songs that take the kind of all-consuming interior monologues that bored, disaffected youth are wrestling with the world over and places them square in the middle of the dance floor before adding call-and-response choruses for good measure – it’s the best collection of perfect pop music you’ll hear all year, the perfect embodiment of the characters that made it that somehow manages to be both wildly ambitious and deceptively simple at the same time.

Former WU LYF member Francis Lung releases his second full-length solo album. Concerning taking responsibility for his life and owning his past mistakes, ‘Miracle’ is a deeply personal album for the Mancunian songwriter, but those grave themes are not reflected in the resplendent music, combining a pared-down singer-songwriter charm with expansive, dream pop-influenced soundscapes.

Inspired by her work on the ‘Peaky Blinders’ soundtrack, Anna Calvi decides to revisit her 2018 studio album Hunter and re-record seven of its songs in stripped-down, reconstructed form, with the help of Courtney Barnett, Julia Holter and IDLES’ Joe Talbot among others. Renamed Hunted, the inner vulnerability of these songs is now foregrounded.

Pale Spring wrote and recorded CYGNUS in Baltimore, whose fertile music scene has seen acts like Lower Dens, Ami Dang and Beach House build rich, self-contained worlds of sound. CYGNUS expands on this foundation, with stately, smooth pop songs incorporating layered harmonies, glitches, and, on "Old Sounds" dog barks. Music runs in Harper Scott's family: a classically trained musician herself, her grandfather studied at Juilliard under his uncle, who played for the New York Philharmonic.

Scott's grandfather sang doo wop, and his influence paved the way for Scott to explore music; eventually, he taught himself how to sample. His accompaniment provides an underpinning for Harper Scott's vocals and instrumentals. Critics noticed CYGNUS when it first came out last year, with glowing reviews in Bandcamp, Tiny Mix Tapes and DAZED. American Dreams Records' vinyl reissues of CYGNUS and DUSK mark the first time they've been made widely available as physical media.

Conceptually, Pale Spring attempts to reconcile contradictions in the human condition: healing from, and feeling comforted by, depression and generational trauma. Harper Scott writes songs that relate "intensely personal accounts" and "the images that haunt my dreams." DUSK abounds with wounds, breaks and bodies; characters yearn, make love, bare themselves. These songs have a dreamlike quality, existing outside of time; their simultaneous spareness, richness and languor belies the pair's intricate collaboration.

"Songwriting and producing are interconnected processes for me," Harper Scott says. Often songs incorporate bits of old ones, as on album closer "Dark," which revolves around an outtake from their sessions for CYGNUS. Here and throughout the record, Harper Scott elasticizes syllables: "Give me a space that I can call sacred," she sings, and just as her harmonies suggest the song's chord progressions, the song suggests such a space.

32-song, 2LP retrospective from Vinyl Passion collecting all of the actresss/singer/icon's most famous musical performances throughout her storied career. Featured here are such legendary numbers as "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend," her eternally famous rendition of "Happy Birthday" for President Kennedy, a pair of duets with Jane Russell, and a duet with Laurence Olivier among many others. You name it, it's here! Pressed on DMM 180g vinyl for superb sound quality!

2020 saw the release of the critically acclaimed career spanning 25-disc box set 'Closed For Business'. Following on from this set is another treat for fans with more rarities released for Record Store Day 2021.This new 12" brings together tracks previously available across the formats for the bands 'Seven EP' release in 1997. The music on the EP reveals a transitional sound for the band, in which the club-crossover brit-pop style of their earliest work is left behind in favour of a more organic sound, one closer to progressive rock and post punk. It also features the first collaboration between the group and Magazine frontman Howard Devoto in 'Everyone Must Win'.

180 gram vinyl reissue of 1969 psychedelic blues classic on Stable Records, original copied sell for upwards of £400.

Here's something to get us through the crisis - the promise of a new Lady Gaga album. Cue excitement amongst her 162 million little monsters fanbase. CHROMATICA is said to be a cyberpunk record (perhaps a bit like Billy Idol's 1993 album?) and sees her working with producers such as Mark Ronson, SOPHIE and Boys Noize.

‘Supernormal’ and ‘Mercury and Me’ is the first new music from Everything Everything since the release of acclaimed 5th LP RE-ANIMATOR last year which emerged to widespread critical acclaim last summer with many hailing the band’s visionary cocktail of intricate experimentation and immediately accessible art-pop. Released on 10inch colourful splatter vinyl for Record Store Day 2021, the realise also includes remix from tracks from RE-ANIMATOR from Foals and IOE AIE.

Denise Johnson's debut acoustic album 'Where Does It Go' is a very Mancunian affair. Recorded in Ancoats with Thomas Twemlow on acoustic guitar, she covers iconic songs that mean something to her from Manchester bands including New Order, The Smiths & 10cc as well as her own compositions.

The Freakbeat Scene brings together 25 remarkable tracks, virtually all of them much sought after on original Decca/Deram 45s. Save yourself money and buy this loving compiled 2 x LP set in heavyweight 180 gm vinyl. The Freakbeat sound, was mainly a sub-genre of late 1960s UK rock and roll, which many of the artists, and their styles, went on to become a larger part of British music history. Includes early recordings from the Attack, the Birds, Marc Bolan and the Small Faces.

Stealing Sheep are an electro pop band from Liverpool, England, who formed in 2010.

The debut studio album ‘Into the Diamond Sun’ was released in 2012 by Heavenly Recordings

Manchester darling Songs for Walter returns with his second LP, An Endless Summer Daze.

Songs for Walter, otherwise known as Manchester-based songwriter Laurie Hulme, is rapidly becoming one of the city’s unsung heroes thanks to his seemingly whimsical, but often deeply touching brand of folk-pop.

Ed’s No.6 Collaborations Project follows the release of Cross Me featuring Chance The Rapper and PnB Rock and I Don't Care with Justin Bieber, which shot straight to No.1 in the UK; and has remained there for four consecutive weeks. The album is a collection of the most exciting collaborations on the planet.