That Music List: 2026

Saturday, 1 August 2026

LIST 265 – 01/08/2026

Hello again,

"Do you know Mysterious Art?", my German exchange partner Steffen asked me early on my second exchange visit to him and his family, over the autumn 1989 half term.

Despite the Carl Orff-sampling, Goethe-quoting Das Omen (Teil 1) by Mysterious Art having spent nine weeks atop the German charts earlier that year, I did not know them. That situation didn't last long.

A purchase of the cassette version of the Omen - The Story parent album from the Giessen branch of Karstadt was duly completed before the return home. It's seen a heck of a lot of use ever since.

I wouldn't have had the wisdom to know at the time, and it would be pretentious to suggest otherwise at this remove, but Omen - The Story was a probably a more significant piece of work in the scheme of things than many (and certainly I) would have realised; a synthpop album so heavily, yet accessibly, inflected with darkwave leanings as to count as a crossover album.

It certainly did big numbers at home, and garnered Mysterious Art the support slot on the German leg of Madonna's Blond Ambition tour.

UK pop pickers will have likely missed the career of Mysterious Art under that name in its entirety, but not that of subsequent incarnation Magic Affair, who netted three top 40 hits with a paler imitation of the original - one that basically cashed in on the early-mid 1990s commercial apex of Eurodance.

In nominating four tracks from Omen - The Story for this week's A Loved Album, I'm not going to include Das Omen (Teil 1) again, as both the album version and its vastly superior, Alfred Hitchcock-prologued 12" darkwave dancefloor remix have featured on Lists previously.

There's still plenty to love about the choices I have made, however. In particular, listen to Requiem and try to tell me that Rollo and Ayalah from Faithless don't owe it an enormous debt.

And as for Steffen? I was round his place with our respective families only this last week just gone. Effectively four decades' worth of friendship, laughter and growing (old) in unison, with music seldom if ever absent from the background (especially during Eurovision week).

***

If you've noticed an upturn in the quantity of German or German language material in this and the past couple of Lists, I can confirm that there is no coincidence about that.

My listening habits generally slant towards (re)familiarisation with such music ahead of any trip over there, by way of practice of and exposure to German's timbres and structures. By the time you read this preamble, I will have just returned from spending some time variously in bits of Hesse and Saxony visiting family and friends respectively, assuming this isn't the trip on which I finally inadvertently overdose on the varieties of Ritter Sport you can't get in Britain.

Apart from Mysterious Art, I'm happy to introduce you to Schwermut Forest for, I suspect in most cases, the first time. As punning band names go, that's a corker - Schwermut translates as melancholy, but obviously sounds like a certain verdant, lush and historically famous part of the Midlands.

It also offers a hint as to this 1990s Munich band's seeming fixation upon many things British, and British alternative music of the time in particular. Opening album Pilot could easily have passed as a German reading of New Fast Automatic Daffodils' deadpan alt.funk in places, whilst Guten Tag - included here - from sophomore effort Sort Of is pure Gorkys Zygotic Mynci pastoral pleasure.

Twenty-seven years since that last album, the chances of a third from Schwermut Forest must rate as slim. Never say never, though, as the latest reactivation of this week's Then and Now subject Pink Turns Blue goes to show.

A staple of those Rough Trade Music for the 90s compilations ubiquitous in the CD racks of any German alternative music shop for what felt like eternity, the skittish genre hopping of yore (post-baggy felt a particularly awkward fit) appears to have calmed down somewhat these days, with sole remaining founder member and frontperson Mic Jogwer mining a more conventional indie rock seam, albeit one with more nods to post-punk and darkwave than that otherwise dread term can and will usually accommodate.

Finally on all things German, our occasional Isn't That...? feature catches up with the early-1990s work of one Jens Müller, then more simply known as J, and a rap-rock crossover in Born on the Wrong Side of Town which feels very much of its time stylistically and attitudinally. It's the guest star in the promo that's of no less interest here, however - recognise the diner?

Saturday, 25 July 2026

LIST 264 – 25/07/2026

Hello again,

A hypothesis with which to start this week.

The Hamburger Schule - a pivotal movement in German music, developing a new intellectual and cultural aesthetic, and exclusively Germanophone (at least initially).

That's one take, at any rate.

Another would be that the Hamburger Schule ultimately coalesced around too many places outside Hamburg to be as geographically definable a movement as, say, Madchester; that those at its original Hamburg epicentre had their tongues firmly in cheek throughout (Tocotronic's sarcastic Ich bin neu an der Hamburger Schule; in L'Age D'Or a Germanophone "scene" label with a French name); and that the musical influences of the movement's notional roster far, far exceeded the commonly cited touchstones such as Pavement and The Fall.

Whatever. What's not in dispute is that Tocotronic proved among the Schule's penny number of breakout acts and commercial winners. Twenty years on, the withering analysis of civil disquiet at home shared in this week's List feels no less relevant.

Active for broadly as long as Tocotronic, but operating in a different musical orbit, A Loved Album this week shines a light on Fjorden, the third album (second full-length) by Hagen-born electronica artist and latter day contemporary classical composer Barbara Morgenstern.

A definite developmental step on from previous outings, Barbara's then beloved 1970s issue East German Vermona ET 6-1 (which gave her second album its name) still features prominently on Fjorden, but there are sumptuous, wide-screen instrumentals, agitated beats, record player needle crackles and woozy sound manipulations to enjoy alongside the organ-driven pop. It's the sound of an artist increasing her repertoire, gradually and comfortably.

We touched briefly last week on the seemingly inextricable relationship between an artist and a label, and for the thick end of seventeen years Morgenstern was as much synonymous with (if not solely a recording artist for) Monika Enterprise of Berlin as List #265 guests Wolfsheim were with Strange Ways Records.

An outlet for former Malaria! and Einstürzende Neubauten alumnus Gudrun Gut's releases of music by and for people tired of mainstream club-driven sounds (be they dance or indie), Monika numbers among that small handful of labels whose output I have been able to trust implicitly for at least part of their existence - pretty much all of the first decade of this century in this instance. See also Pickled Egg Records, Wurlitzter Jukebox and - inevitably - Sarah Records thence Shinkansen.

There is a German element to the inclusion from excellent Irish shoegaze/dreampopper Keeley, too, in as much as Seeing Things, like much of her past few year's output, concerns the disappearance and murder in 1988 of teenage German backpacker Inga Maria Hauser.

It remains one of Northern Ireland's highest profile cold cases; and whilst some may wonder whether a forensic examination of Inga the person, Inga the tourist and ultimately Inga the blameless victim is appropriate material for an album (let alone multiple albums), nothing about Keeley Moss's interviews in such as the Irish World over the years would have you worrying that the interest is anything other than utterly sincere and respectful.

Saturday, 18 July 2026

LIST 263 – 18/07/2026

(The entrance to Pontins, Camber Sands 26/09/2017, a great many years after the venue bore witness to - among other things - The Lonesome Organist playing four instruments at once during an All Tomorrow's Parties festival. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

I'm habitually a bit wary of new releases by musical acts being billed as "events".

Call it perhaps a hangover of having endured so many Britpop and post-Britpop bands' (frequently underwhelming) new singles being aggressively, extensively promoted as "events" back in the day. You'd have been forgiven for thinking the release of D'You Know What I Mean? by Oasis was the single most significant event of 1997, musical or otherwise, such was its trailing.

I also have memories of a period in the 2000s when Channel 4 would show world premieres of singles by prominent acts du jour such as Muse, five or so minutes before one of their flagship shows (I want to say on Friday nights, but I do need to check) and often with similarly hyperbolic billing.

These invariably struck me as potential hidings to nothing for the acts concerned, giving them no place to hide if these new wares were exposed as mediocre compared to previous offerings. Lucky for some of them that hubris didn't let them worry about that.

As far as I'm concerned, "events" in a musical context are strictly either gigs/concerts or commissions (and in the case of some famous examples over the centuries, such as Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, both at the same time). All of which brings us, eventually and circuitously, to a new single from PJ Harvey.

Voyager doesn't owe its creation entirely to Professor Brian Cox, as Polly Harvey had already sketched out the idea of it as a potential future album track. That draft, however, leapt out at everyone's favourite particle physicist Oldhammer as the perfect vehicle for an event of his own, the live scientific musical stage show Emergence. In effect, a commission of completed song for completed show was then initiated.

Sonically evoking the signals of the 1977 NASA Voyager space probe, and lyrically surely one of very few songs ever written from the point of view of a spacecraft rather than that of space or of an astronaut (Major Tom it is not), the finally realised version features synth contributions from Cox himself, marking this out as an increasingly rare foray back into making or performing music for the one-time Dare and D:Ream key prodder (a single-song guest appearance for D:Ream at Glastonbury in 2024 is just about all else there's been in recent memory).

For Harvey, it's a further welcome, engaging release in what's been a particularly productive past few years. Work on the intended parent album of Voyager already appears at least some way on, not yet much more than three years since the release of I Inside The Old Year Dying and its substantial tour, and with late 2024's twin salvo of the London Tide cast recording and the Bad Sisters season #2 soundtrack having been added to the CV in the interim also.

Putting together an anywhere remotely representative A Session of Sorts for her this week was always going to be an impossible ask, all the more so having already surrendered eleven strong candidates to other Lists before now. I couldn't not include something from Let England Shake (for me still a career high), however, nor 2004's The Desperate Kingdom of Love, having been reminded of the latter's quiet power at Polly's 2024 Halifax Piece Hall concert (another actual event, you'll note).

Finishing off this List with compilation semi-rarity Other Galaxies by The Field Mice wasn't an attempt to uphold the space theme of Voyager yet further, by the way - I'd already had this one inked in for The Long Goodbye this week a long time before Polly's newie.

I can't remember whether this was an outtake from the Sarah Records mainstays' final album For Keeps, but it bears many of the stylistic traits and comparative muscle of much else from that period of the band's evolution. I'm as certain as I can be that it's the longest track The Field Mice ever let see the light of day, too.

***

Elsewhere this week, the inclusion of a track by Rheingold in the Germanophone feature gives us chance to consider briefly their late frontperson Bodo Staiger, arguably the closest the Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) movement came to anointing any heartthrobs - certainly any cross-disciplinary ones, at least.

That status was consolidated by Staiger's appearance in the 1982 German cult horror movie Der Fan, wherein he starred as a super-famous new-wave singer who, upon rejecting the advances of an obsessive female fan, is killed, frozen and systematically eaten by her.

(The eponymous fan, by the way? A then seventeen year-old Désirée Nosbusch, just two years before she'd host the Eurovision Song Contest in her native Luxembourg. Bet they didn't play any clips of Der Fan on the night).

When not being bumped off by usually wholesome entertainers from miniscule European countries, Staiger could be found at the helm of precise yet insistent, irresistible synthpop tracks such as Dreiklangsdimensionen. That both Staiger and bandmate Lothar Manteuffel would later undertake separate projects with offloaded members of Kraftwerk makes sense.

I never worked out whether Rheingold's naming themselves after a Wagner opera was ironic - there's certainly none of the histrionics of such as the Ring Cycle here. Less open for debate, meanwhile, is whether German darkwave synthpoppers Wolfsheim took their name from a character from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby entirely sincerely - they admitted as much.

Lovers of the genre likely still mourn to this day the duo's spectacularly ugly implosion in the mid-late 2000s when at their commercial peak (a platinum album and appearances on the German iteration of Top of the Pops, no less), amid a welter of trials, ceases and desists, and a reconciliation appears no likelier two decades on.

The inclusion of The Sparrows and the Nightingales in our occasional darkwave feature this week rights a longstanding historic wrong. Of all of the recent selections I have noted I could have sworn had been included on a List years ago but hadn't, this longstanding member of my all-time top ten favourite songs is by some way the most astonishing omission.

I can't even claim I was saving it for a special occasion, though more through pure dumb luck than skill it does appear here almost exactly 35 years since it was first released (15/07/1991).

A word here for Wolfsheim's longest serving backers, Strange Ways Records of first Bremen and later Hamburg. So synonymous with one another were band and label, it's easy to misremember Sparrows... as being the first ever Strange Ways release.

It wasn't, not by at least a couple of years; but in terms of putting a label on the map with an early release, this haunting, sad meditation on The Great Gatsby's themes of security and predators represented as much of a statement of intent as, say, Pristine Christine did for Sarah Records right from the word go.

Hopefully there's plenty else to entertain you as usual this week, including:

more new or recent material from Special Friend, Les Big Byrd, Alison Cotton, Slippers, Penelope Isles and an absolute jackhammer from L'Rain (how have I managed to miss her up to now?).

a second selection since That Music List resumed from Language of Flowers, but the first since learning of their gigs in London, Paris and Hamburg this coming September - their first for nigh on eleven years. A new album in a more dreampop direction is anticipated, though with the proceeds from last year's reissued Songs About You having funded its recording it seems unlikely that the old favourites will be lost from their set entirely.

a personal favourite from that little period in 1995-6 when there appeared to be a brand new Baby Bird album out every other week. These comparatively simple, largely homespun recordings endure as my preferred Stephen Jones output to this day.

a reminder of the talents of the almost literally many tentacled Chicago musician Jeremy Jacobsen, aka The Lonesome Organist. Any others present with me at the Camber Sands 2002 renewal of All Tomorrow's Parties will remember seeing this singularly dexterous performer occasionally operating as many as four pianos, keyboards or percussion instruments at once; I'm sure I didn't dream up him playing two keyboards with his feet at one stage.

some Italian horror soundtrack fun from Goblin, not just because it's characteristically great stuff, but also by way of a little get well soon to Sheffield indiepop performer, DJ and gig promoter (and dedicated horror fan) Daniel Hartley. Thinking of you, mate - you've got this.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 28/06/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

EUROTASTIC
RADIORAMA - Vampires (1986)

SPECIAL FRIEND - Clipping (2026)

HUGGY BEAR - Herjazz (1993)

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS – Come, Life, Shaker Life! (2020)

MOLLY DRAKE – Poor Mum (196x/2007)

PIXIES – Caribou (Peel Session) (1988)

A SESSION OF SORTS: PJ Harvey
PJ HARVEY - Voyager (2026)
PJ HARVEY – Reeling (1993)

I WAS AN ARMCHAIR RAVER
HUMANOID - Stakker Humanoid (1988)

LES BIG BYRD - Ruin Everything (2026)

JOHN FOXX – This Jungle (1981)

LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS – Summer’s Been and Gone (2004)

ALISON COTTON - I Am! (2026)

THE WHITE STRIPES – Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine (2003)

WIR SIND DIE NEUEN GÖTTER
WOLFSHEIM - The Sparrows and the Nightingales (1991)

A SESSION OF SORTS: PJ Harvey
PJ HARVEY - The Colour of the Earth (2011)
PJ HARVEY - The Desperate Kingdom of Love (2004)

THE LONESOME ORGANIST – Balloon Race Phenomenon (1999)

SLIPPERS - Reading Lucy’s Diary (2026)

GOBLIN – Markos (1977)

BOB MOULD - Forecast of Rain (2020)

BEANPOLE - Never Again (1998)

I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU
ALFIE TEMPLEMAN - Obvious Guy (2020)

DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT
RHEINGOLD - Dreiklangsdimensionen (1980)

L’RAIN - Soulless Cycle (2026)

THE HEART THROBS – I, The Jury (1987)

OMD - Metroland (2013)

BABY BIRD - Steam Train (1995)

PENELOPE ISLES - Thinking Seat (2026)

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
MARTHA – Chekhov’s Hangnail (2016)

THE LONG GOODBYE
THE FIELD MICE - Other Galaxies (1991)

Saturday, 11 July 2026

LIST 262 – 11/07/2026 (a 2018 collection)

Hello again,

Almost a week on, I've finally found a few minutes to collate my thoughts on a magical first musical festival experience for the kids last Saturday.

Just getting to Pop At The Lock and catching up with organisers Kev Birchall and Linda Yarwood, plus many old friends (some for the first time in easily a decade), would have counted as wonderful enough on its own.

The kids getting to see The School, favourites from our assorted playlists, improved it.

The School playing That Boy is Mine, the much-loved staple of the kids’ bedtime indiepop playlist, improved it further.

Finding and getting The School t-shirts their size in the merchandise stall improved it yet further still.

The School lending our youngest (“our superfan”, they enthused) a tambourine near the end of their set and bidding her to play along to Let It Slip… well, that was just the icing on the cake.

For our daughter - so worried beforehand about the festival all being a bit people-y and noisy for her – to be that engaged and enjoying herself was just a joy to behold.

Needless to say, a massive thanks to all of The School, and multi-instrumentalist Francesca Dimech in particular, for their kindnesses… and of course for a knocking good set, old favourites, striking newie Honeycomb and all.

(The School, Pop at the Lock, Middlewich 04/07/2026. Pictures are author's own)

Thanks, in fact, to everyone who took the time to engage and chat with both kids, and make them feel so at ease. There’s the danger, of course, that they’ll think every festy is as nice as this now. That’s not actually a bad thing to strive for, though, is it!

Other highlights of the day were plentiful, and included but were by no means limited to:

The aforementioned Francesca revisiting her captivating Word Salad repertoire, and reminding our kids not to smoke unless they wanted their carelessly discarded lighters to attract undead firefighters (it does happen).

Our son gasping at just how many swearywords MJ Hibbett fitted into two songs in particular (Hibbett regulars can probably guess which two).

Both Hibbett and Jetstream Pony’s Beth Arzy managing to elicit boos from the crowd over the World Cup’s dehydration breaks. The latter enjoyed slightly less success trying to get everyone to root for Mexico over England in the football, although the logic – a tournament win for Mexico would enrage Trump to the point of rupture – was impeccable.

Quad 90 and Foglights delivering sets that practically demand I explore them both further hereafter. The former’s inclusion on the bill makes so much sense with hindsight, offering up as they do a variant on the disco of Kev and Linda’s beloved Say She She, albeit filtered a little more through the punk-funk gauze of the likes of ESG. Arresting stuff. Foglights, an utterly new name to me previously but comprising one member each of The Cords and Stone Anthem, brought to mind a psychedelic folk take on the (often) drumless, vulnerable yearnings of Sarah Records mainstays Brighter. That counts as high praise in my book.

A wonderful set by The Sunbathers; concise, poignant (new song Strong Enough especially) and reflective. Lovely to see a vibraslap in action, too, and yes, the kids inevitably want one of those as well now.

Introducing our boy to the joys of record shopping/crate digging, as we rifled through the boxes of Pete Bee’s finest vinyl together and I found a couple of gap-fillers in my collection (one each from Delicate Vomit and The Garlands). One day, son, all these sevens, tens and twelves shall be yours and your sister’s (to say nothing of all the CDs and tapes).

A day to treasure, then. With no more Pop at the Lock or Indietracks, though, how are we going to top it? Wales Goes Pop, Glas-Goes Pop or – if we find a few quid behind the sofa – Indiefjord, perhaps?

******

(The Sunbathers, Pop at the Lock, Middlewich 04/07/2026. Pictures are author's own)

That appearance by The Sunbathers was actually very timely in the context of this week's selection of tracks on That Music List, as A Loved Album takes in four songs from their beautiful debut longplayer from 2018.

By turns wistful, romantic, pointed, fragile and comforting, A Weekend Away With... invites warm and respectful comparisons with the likes of Marine Girls and Young Marble Giants (the latter the subject of one of two cover versions played by the band at Pop at the Lock, fittingly enough), but there's an overriding yearning present which feels very much their own.

I remember a Cambridge Music Reviews piece on the album upon its release which theorised that the duo's status as an East Midlands band feeds that sense of longing, this being an act which loves the sea but lives about as far from any coast in England as it's possible to get.

I can buy into that theory entirely, having lived practically on the Scarborough seafront for five years around the turn of the century but now based almost as far inland in Sheffield as The Sunbathers themselves. Every return trip to the North Yorkshire coast - and there are many - is immediately followed by the commencement of plans to do another one. I would not be the least bit surprised were Julie and Paul the same.

Either way, A Weekend Away with... is a quietly triumphant body of work to be treasured, and it was wonderful to learn at Pop at the Lock that the release of a follow-up may not be at all far away now.

You'll have worked out already from the subtitle that The Sunbathers' aren't the only selections among this week's List to hail from 2018. Everything does.

This was, as has probably been mentioned ad nauseam by me on here now, the year in which That Music List paused for breath temporarily, only to fall asleep for well over seven years. Indeed, some of the songs below were already pencilled in for inclusion in Lists 237, 238, etc. some time in spring of that year, only for events to supersede me somewhat.

Ah well, I hope we're well on the way towards making up for lost time this year, with 41 posts (and counting) already.

I also hope that there's a few tracks on here that stop you in your tracks and have you exclaiming, "eight years ago? Really?". I know there are for me, and in at least two cases poignantly so. The Chills' Martin Phillipps and Tim Smith of Cardiacs (subject of a spine-tingling cover here by Alison Mathews) were still among us back then. No longer.

The inclusions from Gwenno, Linda Guilala and Grace Petrie are all right up there among my personal highlights from the entire year, with Eus Keus by the first-named (a towering, mysterious single deserving of far better than the occasional glib epithets of "That Cheese Song" one sees and hears) just shading it over the second-named as my favourite single of 2018.

Mucho Mejor prompted me to reappraise Linda Guilala's catalogue completely, having evidently not been paying sufficient attention to hook into all of the motorik, Stereolabby hums contained therein. Not just another sunny, Spanish-language female-fronted indiepop act, this, their presence on Elefant Records - home of many such - notwithstanding.

Turn of the century hitmakers and antagonisers of rockist festival crowds par excellence, Daphne & Celeste were always more interesting, rounded people than a small handful of taunting, ad hominem singles gave them credit for. Some impressive credits in Off-Broadway theatre and Wim Wenders-produced cinema helps say as much.

Knowing that, the fact that their 2010s comeback comprised collaborations with experimental musician and producer Max Tundra, often erring more on the side of outré electronica rather than pure pop (and even covering a Captain Beefheart track), becomes that bit less of a surprise. It still served to annoy all of the right people all over again, though, especially those who turned up at their 2018 UK tour expecting just the hits. Good.

As such, Alarms doesn't go into the I Love Pop Music And I Will Fight You strand this time, but there's something no less fine from Janelle Monae which does instead.

Finally, with visuals about as unsettling as the music which they accompany, I feel morally obliged to apologise in advance if The Third Eye Foundation's video gives you nightmares.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 28/06/2026).

Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.

Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

HAIKU SALUT – The More and Moreness