Punk music is folk music, in that it’s one of the most straightforward descriptions of current communities and hopes in popular music. Metal music is popular music, as it’s one of the most pervasive styles of music celebrated among lower-class people across all continents. Grindcore, that violent, explosive, hyperactive, and overachieving child of metal, is also popular music, its extremity now a source of comfort, tradition, community.

More about: THE HIRS COLLECTIVE

“I think my imagining or speculation comes out of a long Andean tradition that didn’t prioritise the written word or logos, but used textile and the body as legitimate forms of communication, modes of carrying and preserving historical memory, for example. Andean trans revolutionaries like Candy, Ofelia, Titina and Barbarella incarnated their politics using dance, body, song and dress, all as a means of negotiating agency and ‘speaking’ back to power, as opposed to theorising through text or appealing to academic and governmental institutions.”

More about: Elysia Crampton

An empty bliss beyond this world. Titled as such, Leyland Kirby’s breakthrough work in his ongoing study of dementia as The Caretaker announced itself not only as an object of horror, but as one concerned with infinite, impossible beauty.

More about: James Leyland Kirby, The Caretaker

It feels like a play. Not even: a play within a play. A simulacrum that is a yearning, a longing, a stretching, a reaching, a detour from her old-school hip-hop lean that drives straight into the emo of the 1990s and early 2000s, into a childhood now magically overcome and returned to her. All those tears shed on black shirts while pure evil moved somewhere underneath the visible surface of the world.

More about: Princess Nokia

We’re going to the beach. Not the clean, iridescent shores of film scenes or sepia photographs, signifiers of a landscape that privilege the temporal over the spatial — it is always the childhood or the honeymoon that we beckon toward, and whether the sand in the picture belongs to Blackpool or New Jersey is mostly irrelevant — but the real beach. The sun is not shining. It rained a few hours ago, in fact, or is just about to, because there’s a dull kind of sadness in the air that lingers either side of the storm.

More about: Grouper

Ray Ray From Summerhill is YFN Lucci’s second project named in tribute to a dead friend (following last year’s Long Live Nut), and there’s no reason in particular to think that it will be his last. But who’s counting? Tragedy, to paraphrase Stalin, is a prime example of the “one, two, many” number system. Accordingly, Ray Ray is an album less about wallowing in grief than living with and beyond it, the integration of a gaping void into one’s ongoing existence.

More about: YFN Lucci