Inside this month’s free Uncut CD – Nocturnes: the month’s best new music

Mogwai, Eddie Chacon, The Innocence Mission, Bridget Hayden & The Apparitions and Euros Childs all appear on the latest free Uncut CD.

The compilation, entitled Nocturnes, comes with the January 2024 issue of Uncut, and showcases the month’s best new music.

See below for more on the full tracklisting…

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1 Brown Spirits
Mind Rocker (Part 1)
We kick off our exploration of this month’s best new music with a slice of grooving motorik garage from Melbourne’s Brown Spirits. The duo’s latest offering, Cosmic Seeds, continues their journey into kraut-centred deep space, but with an extra helping of analogue funk.

2 Rose City Band
Radio Song
Ripley Johnson doesn’t change the formula on Rose City Band’s new album, Sol Y Sombra, but there’s no need when he’s creating choogling, rolling delights like this, with lilting pedal steel and a psychedelic propulsion.

3 Bridget Hayden & The Apparitions
She Moved Through The Fayre
Todmorden-based Hayden is best known for her work with experimental and noise music, yet her spectacular new LP, Cold Blows The Rain, is a collection of spectral, dour traditional folk, with the singer and multi-instrumentalist playing Lankum at their own doomy, magisterial game.

4 Straw Man Army
Earthworks
Straight out of Brooklyn, this DIY two-piece twist the thorny post-punk of Wire and Mission Of Burma into stunning new shapes. Here’s the title track of their third album, a rallying cry against the modern American nightmare.

5 Euros Childs
Ursula’s Crow
On his 20th album, Beehive Beach, the former Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci frontman has swerved his experimental tendencies and written 12 sublimely melodic and melancholic songs. The piano-based arrangements only burnish these tales of childhood and the countryside.

6 The Innocence Mission
Your Saturday Picture
Midwinter Swimmers is the latest album by the Pennsylvanian veterans, led by songwriter and vocalist Karen Peris, and here’s one of the record’s many highlights; gauzy and introverted, it suggests both Yo La Tengo’s bossa nova excursions and Arthur Lee’s most pained transmissions. “Love is the sound,” Peris sings.

7 Eddie Chacon
End Of The World
After 20 years of silence following his time as half of Charles & Eddie in the ’90s, Chacon has carved out a slyly stunning solo career this decade. Working with collaborator Nick Hakim on new LP Lay Low, his songs nod to both classic R&B and more modern psychedelic soul.

8 Mogwai
Lion Rumpus
Producer John Congleton has been enlisted for The Bad Fire, the Glaswegians’ 11th album and the follow-up to their UK No 1 As The Love Continues. Here’s the first track to be taken from it, a classic, gnarly Mogwai mix of glistening synths and jet-engine guitars.

9 Songhoy Blues
Gara
Bamako-based Songhoy have often turbo-charged their desert blues with distorted guitars and rock rhythms, but on their fourth album, Héritage, they prove that they can do just as well embracing their roots with acoustic guitars and percussion.

10 AJ Woods
Hawk Is Listenin’
From deep in New Mexico comes a supergroup of sorts: on this psychedelic Americana record Woods is joined by members of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Neutral Milk Hotel and more. The result is suitably sun-baked, like Neil Young stumbling and lost in the Albuquerque heat.

11 Joshua Burnside
Up And Down
Belfast musician Burnside matches his acoustic singer-songwriter influences with a more experimental bent, taking in electronica and field recordings: the results, as on his new album Teeth Of Time, provide the perfect forum for ruminations on fatherhood and the passing of time.

12 Anna B Savage
Lighthouse
A recent move from the UK to Ireland has inspired You & I Are Earth, the third album by this London-born artist. She’s also teamed up with Lankum producer John “Spud” Murphy, which provides the 10 tracks on the record with a certain overcast richness to match Savage’s eerie voice and the songs’ coastal themes.