Calling Out To Call It In

The music is this week's blog is a heady rush that takes you from the depths of damaged introspection to the glorious heights of enduring ecstatic pop. Fasten your seat belts, here we go.

Andrew Wasylyk. Diane Birch, Hannah Peel and Beibei Wang, Heavenly, Jenny Hval, Mull Historical Society, Neil Diamond,  Photay, Red Rum Club, Shapes Like People,    Tom Smith, U2

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (Spotify)

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (YouTube)

Irreparable Parables : Andrew Wasylyk

Best for : Those needing a stress reboot and a reminder of beauty in music.

Andrew Wasylyk is fast becoming essential listening every time he releases new music, without ever forcing himself on you. He's content simply to be found by those that care to listen to him.

To call him genre fluid is only half the story. You'll find elements of folk, chamber and spiritual jazz, classical, library and electronic music here, all connected by exquisite melodies and arrangements. What makes the songs special is their warmth, the gentle humour and the sun dappled light he allows to wash over them.

These are songs that capture the relief at the end of stress and pain, the disappearance of tension and the first feelings of joy. Something like 'First Moonbeams of Adulthood' feels spiritual but not religious. He doesn't need the God bit, just the love and the wonder at the world around us that comes with it. In a funny way it possesses the same sense of peaceful strength you take from Oriental music without sounding in the slightest oriental There's also a sense that the folk influences are revealing truths that are centuries old. It's enough to move a man to tears of happiness!

There are more featured vocalists that you've come to expect from Wasylyk. You can learn a lot from the company a man keeps, and in the likes of Stuart Murdoch (Belle and Sebastian), Gruff Rhys, Field Music and Kathryn Joseph, Wasylyk is making a quality statement. Stuart Murdoch's tremulous vulnerability is exactly what's needed in 'Private Symphony #2'. Molly Linen's vocals on 'Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever' help to make it one of the most life affirming songs you'll hear this year. The vocalists enhance the songs but are not allowed to take centre stage which remains filled by Wasylk's string laden and heavenly music.

There's a playful humour at play too that stops the music becoming too serious. It may not be significant, but I love the fact that both words in the album title contain the word 'parable'. It gives an Aesop type wisdom to the record. I love, too, the gorgeous, 'fit to hang on your wall' cover art that features six songbirds, one for each of the guest vocalists. And anyone who features a woodpigeon cooing in the background is demonstrating a feel for natural sounds that can only improve a song.

This is an album to treasure and one to return to every time life starts to feel too much.

Taster Track : Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever

Windswept : Photay

Best for : Finding pleasure in rhythm, sound and the weather

Have you ever enjoyed sitting on a hillside, warmed by the early Spring sun, and gently buffeted by a mild breeze? Were you ever caught in a trance watching the patterns made by wind passing through a field of crops? If so, this album is for you.

This is an album about climate and the weather, particularly the wind. It's uncanny how he captures the sense of the wind in his music, how it moves in gusts as it rises and falls and abruptly changes force and direction. Photay composes music that shows the weather and climate as our friends, a source of happiness to celebrate.

You could describe his style as free-form electronica, a word more commonly associated with jazz. It is. Photay is a producer first of all, and he shows off his skills here not to impress but to entertain. If there are moments when it feels like library music, it's library music drawn from the hidden, dusty corners of the shelves where the special editions and other delights are stored.

From the opening track, 'Forecast', you wouldn't anticipate what is in store. It's an acapella chorale of electronically treated voices that's haunting but unrepresentative of what follows. More typical is the perky 'Global Wind Trade', a world tour of rhythm and music moving as freely as the winds traverse countries and continents. 'Air Lock' shows this album to be intelligent, mixed up and beguiling with abrupt changes of style. 'Zephyr' is the tune that best captures the feel of the wind, while 'Barely There' is the least conventionally structured and most boldly ambient piece.

There's no direct equivalent to Photay's carnival spirit wrapped up in fragmented electronic colours that comes to mind, although there were moments when his music helped me to feel as I once did listening to Mr Scruff and similar artists.

'Windswept' is a satisfying and successful electronic foray into the natural world.

Taster Track : Global Wind Trade

There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn't There In The Light : Tom Smith

Best for : Being alone with dark thoughts in the wee small hours

Tom Smith is best known for being the singer of alternative rock band, Editors. He's a little less well known for being half of Smith and Burrows, the addictively catchy pop duo. Here he's just himself, stripped bare and contemplating his darkest fears and thoughts.

'There Is Nothing In The Dark…' is one of those compelling albums that evokes compassion and despair in equal measure. It's the album of a man who is clinging to the hope that hope itself can be found somewhere. 'Endings Are Breaking My Heart' is the most devastating example of that.

It's a close run thing though. The songs here form the hard earned lessons of a nearly broken man. It's touch and go whether he will break through his troubles. Even when he strikes a defiant tone on 'Life Is for Living' you sense that he is trying to convince himself as much as offering self help advice. If he sings it often enough, he'll come to believe it.

This is a very personal album that you feel had to be made alone. It's not so much inviting you into his world as placing it so close that you can't escape around it. The album highlight 'Deep Dive' sets the tone. It's sparse, introspective, dark of the night stuff but contains a beautiful melody with whispered gospel tones. What follows is a set of stripped back acoustic guitar, occasional bleak and mournful strings and melancholy piano. It's a powerful mix.

This can only be described as sounding like the real Tom Smith, and no one else. Nevertheless it strikes the same tone as The Blue Nile and, bizarrely, the vocals carry similar inflections to a more weathered Paddy Macaloon in the mature days of Prefab Sprout.

If this is middle of the night music it will hold you rapt and transfixed, and it will linger with you long after the relief of dawn.

Taster Track : Deep Dive

Iris Silver Mist : Jenny Hval

Best for : Fans of Norse legends and Scandi-Noir experimentation.

It's taken me a long time to come to Jenny Hval. Individual songs regularly appear on playlists the algorithm wizards think will appeal to me but, while interested, I've never felt the urge to dive deeper. 'Iris Silver Mist' came out in May last year and it's only now risen to the top of my listening list.

In some ways that hesitation isn't misplaced. This is a challenging and experimental album. The opening track 'Lay Down' combines the rhythm of medical machines with the beauty of compassion and love as it may be heard while lightly sedated. It's unflinchingly dark and starkly honest. And it's the most accessible song here, a quiet masterpiece.

'Iris Silver Mist' is intensely personal, but I wonder too if it harks back to her Norwegian culture and heritage. Just as Norway is on the edge of Europe, straddling the Arctic Circle Jenny Hval's music sounds on the edge of something perilously close to white out and emptiness. There's a sense throughout that she is making personal myths to sit alongside the Norse legends of old. She's making myths out of death, loss, disease and breakdown and she's setting them into a disturbing but rhythmic, electronic prettiness. By the time you reach the atmospheric doodle with sound effects that is 'Spirit Mist' you may be thinking "What's this all about? What's going on?"

Here's the thing though. This may be experimental and bleak but it's not off-putting. You will want to understand it. 'The Artist Is Absent' may sound unlike anything else, but it opens a door to something new that you'll want to look through.

For the most parts these are not songs that are naturally melodic, but the synth work gives them a firm musical grounding. Rhythm and pulses shape the songs like a sculptor chipping away at clay. 'I Want To Start At The Beginning' is intriguing, intimate and compelling - a breakdown of what makes a person. The spoken word passages are like a conversation that could turn tricky at any moment, creating a feeling of instability adjacent to madness at its core. Her vocals are mostly restrained and gentle, but unsettling too. In the midst of all the experimentation, it's easy to overlook that this is, above all, a fine electronica album.

There's a song here called 'I Don't Know What Free Is'. Musically at least, Hval knows exactly how to free herself from the shackles of conventional pop. This is experimental music and it's challenging. It's also rewarding.

Taster Track : Lay Down

Buck : Red Rum Club

Best for : Those who like albums where every track's a potential hit single.

It's Grand National Day, and Red Rum Club are fast out of the stalls with no thought for pacing themselves. They're just excited to be front runners for at least a short time. All they want from the experience is to have fun and enjoy themselves.

They may be outsiders in the race to dominate pop, but that's due to public taste, not any lack of ability on their part. Over five albums they've become very good pop songwriters in the mould of The Zutons or The Coral. Like the early Undertones or The Vaccines, they know that if you only need a couple of minutes to make your point, that's all you take. Most of these songs are under three minutes long. They give you the effects of a hyper energetic sugar rush with none of the tetchy consequences of a sudden sugar crash.

Even if you don't remember their name, you may know them as the indie band with a trumpet. They've also embedded the trumpet in their sound to give them a rich sound overall rather than showcasing it as an added on gimmick to give themselves a USP. On 'Someone's Baby Isn't Coming Home' they even ham up their own mariachi matador image.

Red Rum Club give you enduring blasts of energetic, crowd pleasing indie pop that's going to leave you feeling good. 'American Nights and English Mornings', 'Crush, TX' and 'Call Me On your Comedown' are full of exhilarating hooks and melodies. There's a bite too. The crunching chords of 'Taste' come straight from a slimline rock Heaven released into pop. This is also an album that pushes you towards seeing them live, the songs containing the same excitement that you'll get from a gig.

Red Rum Club give you the pedigree pop you'd expect from the name. They're under starter's orders to be one of your odds on favourites for some while to come.

Taster Track : Crush, TX

Highway To Heavenly : Heavenly

Best for : Seizing the chance to revisit your youth

I don't think I've ever looked to the bible for the inspiration to write a review. There's always a first time though and here we are in the middle of Corinthians, reading "when I became a man, I put away childish things." Replace the word 'man' with 'grown up' and you're in the place where Heavenly can pose the question "Yes…..but what if you could revisit your past and you did?"

The answer is that you would have a gem of a record like 'Highway To Heavenly'.

Heavenly were a big part of the short lived Sarah Records / C86 generation. They were the popular cool kids in sixth form and at uni. Then they grew up, earned PhDs, ran economic think tanks and made music only occasionally in bands like The Catenary Wires. They've reached the stage where they may be thinking about retirement, and what to do next.

They've made their position clear in the lovely, warm song 'Skep Wax'.

"Dreamboat, still afloat.

What can we do.

Let's turn some.

Old thoughts into something new."

If you needed a reason to love their return after 30 years or more, it's right there in those lyrics. In revisiting their dreams, they've given us a musical elixir of youth. In my memory they were full of punky energy propelled by the exuberance of youth. Now the indie melodies are more to the front. Just listen to 'Portland Town' and hear the warmth and sweetness they bring.

The songs here are light and filled with unexpected colour and fun, like rainbows captured in an oily puddle. The ska pop of 'Scene Stealing' is as welcome as the first truly warm day of spring. 'Excuse Me' feels more like they used to be and 'A Different Beat' is more angular, but as good as anything Belle and Sebastian, or The Montgolfier Brothers ' have mined in the melancholy nostalgia field. This, and 'The Last Day' are a marriage of their youthful style with more mature concerns of dreams not turning out as planned and of loss. Both songs are gorgeous.

Heavenly is as heavenly does and the 'Highway To Heavenly' is very good indeed.

Taster Track : Scene Stealing

Flying On Abraham : Diane Birch

Best for : Rich, velvet 70s style big ballads

Once upon a time I was invited to the annual dinner of the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers. It was a very ceremonial affair - full dinner suits, formally announced introductions on arrival, and a whole host of customs and protocols to observe. It was a completely different world from takeaway dinners eaten in your slouchies, and surprisingly enjoyable.

Diane Birch's 'Flying On Abraham' is the musical equivalent of that experience. It's not the kind of music I'd normally be drawn into. It feels as if it should be prefaced with the words 'An Evening With…' It's music with a slightly musty '70s flavour, full of big, weary ballads full of emotions born out of struggle. It's for people who had an epiphany about music listening to the glory days of FM Radio and it has never left them.

Every note is perfectly judged and calibrated. Birch's voice is soulful and jazz toned, the product of a youth spent listening to Steely Dan. It veers closest to pop in the Sade tones of 'Used To Lovin' You'. It feels as if she is supported by an orchestra sized band of rock musicians. The band strive for a flavour of improvised backing with an extended note here and a one off phrase there. They can lay down a groove, as they demonstrate on 'Boys On Canvas' and in the cosmic feel of 'Moto Moon'. They're very much the supporting act though. They're allowed to be loose (in a good way) but not to soar. Birch always remains the boss, the band's centrepoint.

The result of all this is something dense and artistic, like those dark paintings that cover the whole wall in a gallery , or a tapestry that would take forever to unpick.

Just like the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers, it's a different world but it's possible to be drawn to it and comfortable there.

Taster Track : Moto Moon

Under The Rainbow : Shapes Like People

Best for : Music that helps you feel that this is going to be a very good day.

The heightened anticipation you feel when a band you love releases new music always comes with the risk of deflating disappointment. Even with Shapes Like People I'm thinking what if I don't love it? (I do.) What if they've lost what made them special? (They haven't.) What if, horror of horrors, they let me down? (They don't.)

'Under The Rainbow' draws me into its orbit so completely that I forget to make notes and simply sank into its charms. It provides one heady rush of euphoria from beginning to end.

Their debut,'Ticking Haze' may have fallen into place almost by happy accident, but on this follow up they demonstrate a complete mastery of pop melody. That's clear from the off with 'Spiral Back In Time'. It's dressed in jangle clothing with shoegaze chimes and tuning. The sweetest melodies of a song like 'Under The Rainbow' may be served as a dessert by other acts but are used here as the basis for the most satisfying main courses. The multi-layered harmonising is pitch perfect. A song such as 'First Version of You' glistens like crystal clear water droplets caught in the sun. The strings throughout drip honey, offering happy sad tones to 'Be OK' that are capable of uniting strangers into new friendships and future golden memories. 'Find Me There' is one of the songs of 2026 for me. It's the kind of uplifting, soaring song that explains why I love pop.

Some people like to be given comparators before they listen to something new. Try Teenage Fanclub, Camera Obscura but recognise that, above all, they have their own very special sound.

Shapes Like People - the sound of a promise fulfilled.

Taster Track : Find Me There

EPs and Songs

U2 have released new music in recent weeks, but which U2? Is it the messy, all over the place but possessing a raw excitement of their early days band.? Could it be the U2 of 'The Unforgettable Fire' through to 'Achtung Baby' when they could legitimately claim to be the biggest and best band in the world? Or is it the U2 that became glossy, over produced corporate brand of their later albums? Does the EP 'Days of Ash' provide the answer.

On the basis of the six songs here, they're some of all of that. In no particular order. 'American Obituary' is big and loud but preachy and contrived. It's the kind of U2 song that will try to make a statement live, but your abiding impression will be of the lights, smoke and volume rather than the songs itself. 'Your's Eternally' is worse. It's the kind of song that could only have been dreamed up around the board table. Ed Sheeran on a U2 song? Bring in a Ukrainian singer for renewed relevance? Recast U2 as Coldplay? No, no, no!. The song is as bad as that makes it sound. 'The Tears of Things' is much better, as it builds. It does feel that they're trying a little too hard to be the U2 of 'One' though in lines such as "There is no us if there is no them". That line, though, is a lot better than these from 'Song of the Future'. "The future as everyone knows '/ Is where we're gonna be spending the rest of our life." If it's poetry you seek, you'll find a good example in 'Wildpeace', spoken by Jacknife Lee' against an African ambient setting. On 'One Life at a timeU2 the band show that they still have good musical ideas.

U2 have found themselves in a rut all too common to the biggest bands in the world. They evolve from a group into a brand. The Rolling Stones showed how to break away from it with 2023's 'Hackney Diamonds'. They stopped trying to be what their marketing people told them to be, and recorded an album where they were simply having fun. U2 need to borrow a leaf out of that book.

Beibei Wang, Hannah Peel, Mull Historical Society, Sweet Caroline (!), U2

For a highly unusual but wonderfully inventive combination of percussion and electronica, you need look no further than the collaboration between electronic composer and Radio 3 presenter Hannah Peel and Beibei Wang, Chinese percussionist. Both are from the classical world, but their music refuses to be contained within any one genre. 'Awaken The Insects' is a startling opening track. The mix of Wang's forceful clicking stick percussion and Chinese chants propels the track into immediate overdrive. All Hannah Peel can do is try to keep up. It's frenetic, but enjoyable and very different. 'Feed The Fireflies' builds into more of a tune and captures the mysterious loveliness of the insect world through jungle rhythms and technicolour sounds. Together they're as fresh as a sharp grapefruit juice after a cold shower.

The return of Neil Diamond, with a new album out in May, begs the question "Has he still got what it takes?" Yes, he does. His voice is undamaged by age and 'Wild at Heart' has the celebratory sound of a man content in life and his music. Its bar room piano, chopped acoustic guitar, and a Diamond melody in more than one sense brims with energy, vigour and enjoyment. It's a true feel good record.

The indie thrash of Mull Historical Society's 'Where Are The Heroes?' spills unstoppably out of the speakers. Colin MacIntyre wraps up his personal memories in classic three minute single format. It's appealingly unpolished, reminiscent of a noisier Billy Bragg and the kind of indie elder statesmen championed by Steve LaMacq.