New music guide The Neu Bulletin (Luxury Death, Celeste, Don’t Die & more)

DIY’s essential, weekly guide to the best new music.

15th February 2017

Neu Bulletins are DIY’s guide to the best new music. They contain every single thing that’s been played at full volume in the office, whether that’s a small handful or a gazillion acts. Just depends how good the week’s been.

Alongside our weekly round-up of discoveries, there are also Neu Picks. These are the very best songs / bands to have caught our attention, and there’s a new one every weekday. Catch up with the most recent picks here.

Luxury Death - Listerine

The handful of tracks shared by Manchester duo Luxury Death thus far have harboured sugary melodies and pop choruses in bucketloads. Their latest, ‘Listerine’, shows a different side to Ben Thompson and Meg Williams. The Hello 2017 alumni show their bare bones on the new cut, and it’s an approach that exposes their boy-girl harmonies as being just as affecting and sweet as when riding a wave of fuzzed-up indie-pop songs. (Will Richards)

The Britanys - Take It All

Brooklyn quartet The Britanys are currently halfway through their first set of shows on UK shores, and you’d be a god damn fool not to catch them before they leave. ‘Take It All’ – the insistent opening track from new EP ‘Five A Side’ – is but one example of why. Ripping the needling guitar riff from early Arctic Monkeys banger ‘A Certain Romance’ and dropping it in a track that pits them as the successors to The Strokes’ New York throne, it’s simultaneously utterly vital and effortlessly cool. They’re in town until the weekend. Miss them at your peril.

Don’t Die - Big Magic Eyes

By day, Dean Smitten punches out grunge riffs as one third of Doe. He’s also been pottering around playing a few gigs and releasing the odd scruffy track on Bandcamp as Don’t Die. His new release, ‘Big Magic Eyes’, is the most fully-formed the project has ever been, and takes his promising sketches to new heights, with screaming distortion laid over gorgeous, affecting lo-fi indie rock, the likes of which Alex G is known so well for. (WR)

Celeste - Milk & Honey

Celeste’s journey - and her vocalised influences - paint a complicated picture of the 22 year-old. Moving to the British seaside from Los Angeles, and with reference points ranging from Billie Holiday to Kanye West and BadBadNotGood, there’s a melting pot of ideas and experiences that feed into ‘Milk & Honey’. It all comes together in a track that’s smooth as velvet yet hiding a heart-pumping chorus. With a debut EP coming, Celeste’s trip is just beginning, and it’s one to follow closely. (WR)

Loa Loa - Pyrrhic

Loa Loa take their band name from a gross condition which involves a microscopic roundworm embedding itself into peoples eyes (seriously, DON’T look it up), and so perhaps it makes sense that their music burrows right into the cranium with no prisoners spared, too. Their newest single ‘Pyrrhic – as the title might suggest – batters and fuzzes with devastatingly vicious precision. Seriously, do they put something in the water in Brighton? (El Hunt)

Tags: Luxury Death, Listen, Features, Neu, Neu Bulletin