Neu The Neu Bulletin (Big Thief, Babeheaven, Little Scream & more)

Softly bubbling up from warmer climes, there’s a buzz behind Babeheaven that’s impossible to ignore. Slightly daft band name aside, there’s something instantly hooking about debut track ‘Heaven’ - as they fill their glass with all manner of tropical juices, it’s a marker of summer’s imminent arrival, and a first taste of a band who may just own the season.

The delicate wilt of Sufjan Stevens floats throughout Los Angeles Police Department’s latest. That multi-tracked vocal billowing like a familiar duvet amongst admissions that “I find it hard to be alone,” it still manages to find the odd ray of sunshine amongst the loneliness, stabs of strings adding a spring in ‘Hard”s step despite the heartbreak.

“This place smells like piss and beer, can you get me out?” sings Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker; a sentiment anybody with even vague experience of a secondary school P.E changing room can surely identify with. On ‘Masterpiece,’ this Brooklyn duo show a knack for witty, quotidian lyrics time and time again.

Thundering forward, there’s a momentum behind ‘Alopecia’ that marks False Advertising out as potential future leaders of the new grunge pack. Sharing the snot and snarl of Milk Teeth figurehead Becky Blomfield, there’s a similar sense of sickness to Jen Hingley’s rolled-eyes delivery of the track’s everyday, oh-so-relatable focal point: “I hope my hair don’t fall out.”

The Congolese town of Kinshasa might indeed be miles away (3,900 odd miles, to be exact) but in his latest track, ‘KAYA,’ Miles From Kinshasa creates something close, and all-enveloping; ringing with crisp rim-shots, and looming, skeletal bass-shudders. Fitting that Kaya is also a kind of super-sweet coconut jam - this is, rich, textural, and dangerously addictive songwriting.

If Dolly Parton and Prince got together and formed a psychedelic hoedown band, it wouldn’t sound far off Montreal’s Little Scream. Throwing strutting basslines, glammy, glee-filled woops, and thumbs-in-belt-loops guitar riffs together onto a multi-splatted canvas, ‘Love as a Weapon’ marks her first track in four years. Quite some return.