Table of contents for Issue 69 in Under the Radar

When thinking about our 20th anniversary all the usual clichés come to mind about how unfathomably fast time has progressed. When you’re a child the weeks and months to Christmas or summer break move as slow as a sloth. Now that I’m in my 40s the months and years speed by almost as fast as The Flash. Momentous life events that seem quite recent, I’m shocked to realize were five or more years ago. For example, it’s now been 10 years since my wife/Co-Publisher Wendy and I moved from Los Angeles to Virginia. It’s been seven years since my father died and five since my sister passed, but both wounds are still fresh. And perhaps the biggest of all, our daughter Rose is about to turn nine. So it doesn’t…

In the spring of 2018, Adam Granduciel was experiencing one of those rare moments when a person’s professional and personal lives both reach their pinnacle. Having completed a grueling tour with 2017’s A Deeper Understanding, the band’s fourth release that would win a Grammy for Best Rock Album and sell over 200,000 copies, he had somehow cracked the code of making classic rock cool for indie kids. Preparing for the arrival of his first child—a son he’d name after one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen—he approached his 40th birthday as the first songwriter in a generation to stake out new territory within the Dylan-Springsteen-Petty tradition. But with the tours done and over two years having passed since he last wrote a song, he started to feel his next creative move…

To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we have highlighted the albums that have helped define Under the Radar over those years, starting with albums released in 2000 as the initial seeds for the magazine were being planted and stretching all the way to 2021. This is not a definitive list of the best albums of the last two decades, nor is it a complete list of our favorites. Instead it’s a collection of albums that meant something to us for one reason or another. For example, Broadcast was the first ever band I interviewed and The Delgados were the first band I ever interviewed in person, both for another publication just prior to starting Under the Radar, and both artist’s albums at the time are included. For starters I put together…

To look at Idlewild singer Roddy Woomble now, you wouldn’t think a day had gone by since the release of their breakthrough second album, 2000’s 100 Broken Windows, for which we interviewed the band in our very first issue. Still boyish, dressed in a blazer, and nursing a glass of red wine; the Scottish singer gives off the air of the cool new arts teacher fresh out of college. When asked about his strongest feelings from the early 2000s, he fondly remembers an intense period for four young men—at the time the band also featured bassist Bob Fairfoull, guitarist Rod Jones, and drummer Colin Newton—yet to truly prove themselves. “It was almost like every gig was the last gig they were going to play so when we started getting onstage…

“I remember, back then I was kind of at the height of my powers: finally having a little bit of budget, and useful drive and creativity and capacity to experiment. It was just, ‘How can this be better? More interesting?’” recalls Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle as he looks back on the making of their 2000 album, The Sophtware Slump. “I think the name of the game back then was just always topping the last thing that I did, really, I don’t think with any specific intent. It was just like, ‘How can it be more badass than the last thing?’” When Grandaddy graced the cover of Under the Radar’s very first issue in December of 2001, they were wrapping up a year that had raised their profile considerably. The Sophtware Slump,…

After forming in 1988, seminal shoegaze band, Lush, spent the better part of the ’90s leading the genre along with contemporaries Ride, Slowdive, Moose, and Chapterhouse. After 1996’s Lovelife found the band some crossover success in the burgeoning Britpop scene, it suffered a devastating loss in the suicide of drummer Chris Acland, and Lush officially disbanded in 1998. Following two years in limbo after Acland’s death, frontwoman Miki Berenyi felt adrift. The loss was described as “a full on body blow,” and for more reasons than one, she felt like she could not go on with the band.  “Chris died, the band ended, and I needed a couple of years to just regroup,” says Berenyi, talking from her London home just a day before her current band, Piroshka, which she…

Guy Garvey would get there eventually, to the subjects at hand, but first he had to show me his whiteboard. Before our scheduled Zoom conversation about the 20th anniversary of Elbow’s debut, Asleep in the Back, as well as their brand new release, Flying Dream 1, Garvey gave me a quick tour of his home studio. Dominating one wall was a blank canvas upon which he’d written two words in all caps: “ELBOW 10.” It was a space upon which to dream about the band’s yet unwritten 10th full-length album. Even when sitting down to discuss a full-length studio LP that wasn’t yet released, Garvey is already looking ahead to Elbow’s next set of songs, a forward-focused creative mindset that’s defined the frontman of one of the U.K.’s most acclaimed…

Kamasi Washington plays his father’s saxophone. But the Grammy-nominated artist who rose to fame working with legends like Kendrick Lamar and Herbie Hancock didn’t start out on the horn. Nor did he or his musician father ever think he’d play sax at all, the instrument for which he’s now become famous. For at the beginning, young Washington imagined himself a drummer. Today, he remembers seeing pictures of himself playing drums as young as three years old. His father, Rickey Washington, was the sax player in the family. So, the younger Washington tried his hand at piano, then later clarinet. At this point, around the time he was 12 years old, his dad was a little fed up with his son’s musical wanderlust. He kept telling his son that the clarinet…

To conclude, we ask Joseph Mount of British electro-pop band Metronomy some questions about endings and death. Mount started Metronomy as a bedroom project as a teenager, in his native Totnes, in southwest England. By the time his debut album, Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe), was released in 2006 Mount was 23 and living in Brighton. Over the years Metronomy’s lineup grew to include Oscar Cash (saxophone, backing vocals, guitars, and keyboards), Anna Prior (drums and vocals), Olugbenga Adelekan (bass guitar and vocals), and Michael Lovett (on keyboards and guitars, and also of NZCA LINES). The band’s 2011-released third album, The English Riviera, proved to be their true breakthrough, landing on multiple album of the year lists and garnering a Mercury Prize nomination. Three more well-received albums followed—Love…

If there was one unifying pursuit of all consumers of music in the past two years, it was for profound catharsis. We dove deeper into the catalogs of favorite artists in search of it. We caught virtual concerts that stood in for visits to our favorite neighborhood venues for a sense of connection. The introduction of a new band with the It factor that makes you beam with emotion, however, did seem like a phenomenon on indefinite hold. Enter Brooklyn’s Nation of Language. It’s quite something to discover a band whose music elicits singing and dancing, shouting and crying, and remembering and reflecting all at once. The tingles and shivers, and that very specific lump in your throat you get from listening to evocative music are priceless reactions, and you…

Mark Redfern (Publisher/Senior Editor) 1. Super Furry Animals: Rings Around the World 2. Pulp: We Love Life 3. Spiritualized: Let It Come Down 4. Mercury Rev: All Is Dream 5. Elbow: Asleep in the Back 6. Radiohead: Amnesiac  7. Ladytron: 604 8. The Divine Comedy: Regeneration 9. Air: 10,000 Hz Legend 10. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: B.R.M.C. Matt Fink (Senior Writer) 1. Danielson Famile: Fetch the Compass Kids 2. The White Stripes: White Blood Cells 3. Stephen Malkmus: Stephen Malkmus 4. The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2  5. The Avalanches: Since I Left You Celine Teo-Blockey (Podcast Editor/Staff Writer) 1. The Strokes: Is This It 2. Travis: The Invisible Band 3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP 4. Gorillaz: Gorillaz 5. The Avalanches: Since I Left You Mark Nockels (Marketing and Advertising Sales) 1. Elbow: Asleep in the Back 2. The Knife: The Knife  3. My Morning Jacket: At Dawn  4. The National: The National…

The Charlatans were never supposed to arrive in Wonderland. Frontman Tim Burgess says The Charlatans were never supposed to maintain momentum beyond the Manchester scene that defined their early work. To make a single album was an achievement; a second one was unheard of. With 48 singles and 13 studio releases in the rearview mirror, Burgess and company have defied all odds with a 30-year-plus musical legacy. In the early ’90s the band was labeled as Madchester and by the mid-’90s they were associated with Britpop, a scene they have long since outlived. “It’s funny because when the band first started, we were considered to be part of a scene or, for some, the second wave of a scene,” says Burgess. “Grunge came along and was considered to have taken…

At the height of the Haçienda’s popularity, it was a real mission to get into the legendary Manchester nightclub, which was open from 1982 to 1997. A spot on the Haçienda’s guest list was the motivation for twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams and their school chum Jimi Goodwin to form the dance act Sub Sub in the early ’90s. As Sub Sub, the trio would be counted as part of the music industry, therefore ensuring a smooth and gratis entry into the venue’s hallowed halls. “That was really as far as we were thinking,” remembers Andy Williams from his home in Lymm, UK, on the far outskirts of Manchester. “And it just took off.” That is an understatement. Sub Sub sold half a million copies of their UK Top…

Neil Hannon has just eaten a bag of Hula Hoops. The popular UK snack, made of potatoes and corn, are shaped like rings—a fitting shape for Hannon, who celebrates 30 years of his baroque chamber pop outfit, The Divine Comedy. “If anybody can work from home, it’s me,” Hannon says from his home in County Kildare (just outside of Dublin), in Ireland. “I never really stopped writing silly songs.” Hannon, who turned 51 in November, has been releasing these “silly songs” under the name The Divine Comedy for the better part of his adult life. He hit Britpop stardom in the mid-’90s with the albums Promenade and Casanova, and was interviewed for Under the Radar’s second edition to promote his seventh album, Regeneration. “I don’t remember them telling me that…

Rose Elinor Dougall has enjoyed a roller coaster of a ride since she first stepped into the spotlight with the Brighton-based über pop band The Pipettes, which formed in 2003. “It’s weird looking back through my career,” laughs Dougall, “even though I feel I’ve got a strong identity I have been seen in a wide variety of contexts so I can kind of understand why the industry is confused as to where I fit in.”    There was a sense of inevitability that Dougall would pursue a career in music, in some shape or form. “I think I was singing before I could even talk,” she reflects. “My dad was always writing songs and both my parents had huge record collections. I started piano lessons when I was about eight…

Grappling with the contradictions of late capitalism, Weyes Blood—aka Natalie Mering—sounds both inspired and restrained, cautiously navigating a world of increasing polarities. Speaking of the changing face of the indie-sphere and the disintegration of its broader social cohesion she is cautiously optimistic. “We aren’t mourning the loss of a particular scene, like we used to, say 15 years ago. I feel like in this time is a general understanding that things have become more disparate and, in that disparateness, it isn’t easy to change, because we have all been geared into our own little private self. We are all thrown in the mix together and we have to figure out how to connect and reignite the flame.” After a whirlwind year of unexpected obstacles, the music industry is emerging from…

On CHVRCHES’ latest album, Screen Violence, the songwriting is direct, unambiguous, and personal—making it some of their best work yet. The Scottish trio of multi-instrumentalists Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cooke, and Martin Doherty employ the language of cinema, slasher films in particular, as a device to unlock the storytelling, with synthesizers favored by the genre’s auteurs to augment that reality in their musical soundscapes. This suited the darker musical space that the band had found themselves in after an attempt at a more pop process with their previous effort, 2018’s Love Is Dead. Endless song cycles of enduring the hate and violence of internet trolls also peaked and took its toll on Mayberry in the spring of 2019, and meant she found refuge in the confines of this made-up world of…

“It became a symbol to me of everything that I was marinating in, all this existential fear of this relationship with time that was just changing,” says Cate Le Bon, on her latest studio album, Pompeii. “Someone was just constantly fucking with the focus lens.” The story of how Pompeii came to be seems reflective of the artist’s struggle to create amidst a global pandemic: plans were made, flights were booked, studio space was found—only for plans to change on a dime, and for the creative process to become a lot more digital. For Le Bon, she’d just begun production on Pompeii early last year and was looking at recording in beautiful places like Chile and Norway. “I have always got these ideas of, you know, when I make a…

To paraphrase a popular meme: find someone who looks at you the way ascending synth pop duo Magdalena Bay gaze, doe-eyed-ly, at each other. While answering questions about their breakthrough debut album, Mercurial World (released in October by Luminelle), high school sweethearts Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s chemistry is as vividly colorful as their synth washed songs and dazzling DIY videos. A meme analogy is fitting given the pair’s TikTok music video savvy. While those visuals for their recent singles such as “Hysterical Us” and “Chaeri” find them travelling in a magical mini-van and floating down a rainbow river, or starring in grainy infomercials (respectively), producer Lewin cites an earlier clip for when things clicked for the Los Angeles-based duo. In 2019 their VHS-shot, heart and butterfly logo laden video…

ALBUMS Air 10 000 Hz Legend (Astralwerks) While not as immediately lauded by music critics as their 1998 debut, Moon Safari, Air’s 10 000 Hz Legend is, by all means, a solid sophomore effort. But it certainly didn’t feel that way when it was released. The tracks are longer, moodier, and more suited for a film score. It didn’t have the groundbreaking gloss of Moon Safari. It sounds more Flaming Lips-inspired, less like a page from Jeff Lynne’s book. Listening to Legend, it’s clear that the Dunckel French duo ) sought (Nicolas something Godin and different Jean in -Beno the Moby ît album’s production, that they wanted to show audiences and critics that they were capable of more than what Safari had delivered. And that’s okay. Bands should be…

While a diehard music fan through and through, I’m also a comic book nerd at heart. So in the spirit of DC Comics, here I present the partially untold secret origin of how Under the Radar came to be and why it has stuck around for two decades. It may be self-indulgent, but it seemed like the 20th Anniversary Issue was a good opportunity to put our history on the record, for those who care to read it. Under the Radar was born out of love and that love was fittingly born out of music and dancing. It was in the dimly lit basement of Hollywood’s oldest Italian restaurant, Miceli’s, that I first saw her across a crowded dance floor. December 2, 2000 was the date. The occasion was Par…

Ladytron’s debut album, 604, proved that you can acknowledge your musical influences whilst at the same time bring something fresh and exciting to the table. Despite being tagged as part of the electroclash movement, the reality is Ladytron offered something much more nuanced, sophisticated, and substantial than the latest à la mode musical fad. They were built to last. Formed in Liverpool, UK in 1999, the band—Mira Aroyo from Sofia, Bulgaria and Helen Marnie from Glasgow, Scotland, alongside Daniel Hunt and Reuben Wu, both from Merseyside, UK—have celebrated the 20th anniversary of 604 via a repressed limited edition double LP in colored vinyl. It’s an artfully crafted album full of playful, seductive, minimalist electronic pop, featuring a number of propulsive instrumentals, as well as vocals by Marnie and Aroyo (who, at times, sings in her…

In the DNA of Nilüfer Yanya’s music you hear the unmistakable guitar strains of mid-aughts bands such as Interpol, The Strokes, and The Libertines. These were the albums that her older sister was listening to when Yanya was in her early teens. Her mother preferred classical music while her Istanbul-born father played a lot of music from his homeland. Growing up in an interracial family (her mother is Barbadian-Irish and her father Turkish), with parents who were both visual artists, Yanya and her two siblings were encouraged to indulge in creative pursuits—drawing, piano, nature, imaginative play—rather than the indiscriminate consumption of mass pop culture. This is the mélange that sets her apart from most. So unlike her peers, she didn’t spend her childhood mimicking the voices of reigning divas or…

After 15 years of playing venues and festivals, creative arcs can become a bit stale and predictable. Thoughts about greatest hits compilations or nostalgic anniversary deluxe editions start to creep in. The danger of becoming a facsimile of the self suddenly becomes clear and present. The Horrors in this case are quite the oddity among rock bands operating on a larger scale. Perversely so, the British band—Faris Badwan (lead vocals), Joshua Hayward (guitarist), Tom Furse (keyboardist), Rhys Webb (bassist), and Joe Spurgeon (drummer)—have been content being their uncooperative, volatile selves; chaos agents with a knack for courting unusual circumstances. Not that the band is consciously contrarian in breaking their own continuity, as Badwan casually underscores. “I feel like we’re a little bit of an anomaly in some ways; we’ve never…

British musician Natasha Khan, as Bat For Lashes, has always had an eye for the theatrical and cinematic. Her career in music began when Myspace was still in its heyday, but this was a time when artists still had to be proactive to get their music out there. Her first release was a CD-R of demos entitled Who Stole Petretski’s Thunder that she’d hand out at shows. “Bloody hell that was a long time ago!” laughs Khan from her Los Angeles home. “I was a nursery school teacher back then, which paid the rent and of course it was lovely working with the kids. I planned to do a gig every month until I could progress to a stage whereby I could make an album. I remember taking my mini CDs down to…

A Place to Bury Strangers See Through You (DEDSTRANGE) Longevity is a facet that can’t be bought, yet for A Place to Bury Strangers it’s something that comes naturally. This is primarily due to the fact that they’ve never stood still, preferring instead to constantly evolve to the point where no two records ever sound the same. While founding member Oliver Ackermann is the only constant from the band’s formation nearly 20 years ago, his dogged refusal to slip into a formula is a key factor in their progression. Another factor is the ever-changing line-up that brings with it a whole new dimension in terms of collaborative ideas. The band’s sixth album, See Through You, marks their first with recently acquired members John Fedowicz on bass and his spouse Sandra…