Here Be Dragons and Demons

There's quite a bit of grief to process in this edition. Add to that a few examples of poetry in song and a band that smash through the rules and boundaries of traditional pop and you're in for a startling and very different ride.

Alexxandre, Angelo de Augustine, Courtney Barnett, The Greenberry Woods, Infinity Song, Lyr, My New Band Believe, Raica, Sea of Days with Maud Anyways, Trampolene, 

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (Spotify)

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (YouTube)

The Absence of Being : Raica

Best for : Anyone needing space to come to terms and process loss and grief

Context is all. 

I was more than half way through this ambient electronic album before I learned that it is the product of processing grief at the loss of a young child. The jolt that gave me felt as if I was intruding on someone's very personal feelings and had no right to judge them through a review.

It also meant that my feelings about this album fell before and after that realisation.

Early on I could acknowledge that on one level this was very good ambient music. It was soothing, meditative, pretty, absorbing and inventive. Something was missing though. It felt, in a strange way, that it was composed on autopilot but it cast a powerful spell, almost unintentionally. On learning the context it became clear that this was drawn from the most intimate, personal and deep rooted feelings. It came from the source of what it means to be human, processed electronically.

I had been wondering what this music was for. Now the answer was clear. It was to enable full grieving but, more than that, it was a gift to others to afford them the space to sink into and work through their deepest feelings too.

Reviewing the album after recognising that seems shallow. However, it may help to say that this is a collection of slow moving, ambient electronica that drifts by. There is something like birdsong from the far reaches of space, filtering into 'It's In'. The Details' uses drone effects to create something involving and trance inducing. 'Sometimes Sad, But Not' nods at more celebratory organ music that on first hearing, and in isolation, may feel like the introductory track to a prog rock concept album. 'Not There Though; Dive' marks something more positive and stirring and there's the faintest echo of Penguin Cafe Orchestra in the main theme of 'Swirly Doot'.

In the end this feels like an important album, and one that leaves me haunted by something and someone I never knew.

Taster Track : Not There Though; Dive

Dark Sky Reservation : Lyr

Best for: Those interested in the connection between poetry and pop - and the Poet Laureate's pop group!

Simon Armitage is the current poet laureate. In Lyr, he collaborates with Richard Walters (vocalist and multi-instrumentalist) and Patrick Pearson, also good on a few instruments and a producer to boot. Together they make something very different and truly special.

This is not a vanity project. Walters' lyrics and vocals are just as compelling as Armitage's poetry. The band's musical skills contribute to making these proper songs, rather than simply poetry backed by music.The lyrics and poetry bleed into each other, inspiring rhythms and images which tumble forth at a breathless pace. They demand to be heard again not so that they can be understood, but to be savoured. It's not unfair to suggest that the poetry provides the beauty and mild cynicism of the street, while the lyrics and vocals display the ache and honest feeling of the heart. This is an album that can and will draw in people from both ends of the poetry / pop spectrum.

Opening track 'Dark Sky Reservation' holds back Armitage's poetry until half way through. That has the unexpected and perhaps unsought benefit of suggesting the dawn of something beautiful. There's a wrecked humour at play in several of the songs, heard most clearly in the click bait world of 'Blah! Blah! Blah!'. 'The Goldilocks Zone' is a typical illustration of the unique emotions contained in the combination of lyrics and poetry. 'Sirius Alpha, Sirius Beta' is the sound of music that belongs very firmly in 2026, while'French Cursive', with its weather forecast backing, places the songs in the everyday. 'Under Artificial Lighting' provides the first twinges of a surge towards deeply felt emotion that could be euphorically celebratory or devastatingly sad.

In addition to the music contained in the words, the music here is in the down tempo, dance oriented space occupied by London Grammar or The XX, but divided from them by a glass wall.

Dark Sky Reservation - the album - is the dawning of something uniquely beautiful.

Taster Track : Dark Sky Reservation

Creature Of Habit : Courtney Barnett

Best for : Fans of regular indie rock

Courtney Barnett is another artist I've been meaning to delve into for a little while, but somehow not got around to it. That changes with 'Creature of Habit', her first non soundtrack album of new songs for five years.

I'm excited by the sense that she's been the subject of music fan buzz for a few years, regularly appearing on year end lists. I'm looking forward to experiencing the wit in her lyrics and the Aussie energy fuelled by an attractive self belief. I want to feel energised, so it's disappointing that I feel a little underwhelmed.

Don't get me wrong. Everything here is… OK. It's the kind of within themselves performance England deliver in qualifying for major football tournaments. It doesn't excite, although you hope the promise of later success comes when it counts. Each game is an IOU against future euphoria.

It's a strong performance at the outset, the equivalent of Serbia 0 - England 5. The alternative new wave pop of 'Stay In Your Lane' shows confidence without arrogance and is crowd pleasing without selling out. By the time of 'One Thing At A Time' though, my attention is beginning to wander. I'm missing energy, strong melodies and killer choruses and struggling to find things to latch onto.

There are a few moments to savour. 'Mostly Patient' shows that she is as good on her own as she is having fun with a full band. 'Mantis' is a highlight although even there I find myself preoccupied by why she's reading a telephone book, rather than tapping her contact list. 'Sugar Plum' has a healthy dose of indie jangle spirit. It does not escape my notice that the feelings expressed in 'Great Advice' probably apply to me. ("I need your opinion like a needle in the eye.") It's one of the few moments on the album that raises a rueful smile.

Job done then, but through the workhorse contributions of an Ollie Watkins rather than the outrageous talent of Jude Bellingham or Cole Palmer.

Taster Track : Mantis

My New Band Believe : My New Band Believe

Best for : Those wanting something different and wild. And I mean very different and very wild!

Where to start? Reading through my notes, they don't come close to capturing the anarchic spirit of this album. Others may have broken pop's rules. My New Band Believe simply don't acknowledge their existence.

This is an album that believes if you can think it, you can play it. From a fizzing and manic mental state comes a weird headlong rush of tumbling lyrics and abrupt changes of pace and direction that is exhilaratingly edgy in a WTF kind of way. At various stages it calls to mind voodoo, madness and manias that some may feel are best left untouched. Think of Jack Nicholson at his scariest, wearing killer clown make up and taking part in a performance by Cirque de Soleil.

This has all the tension and stored energy of a tightly coiled spring. Songs can be compressed to under two minutes or stretched to over eight, and contain in one song enough ideas to populate an entire album elsewhere. Take 'Heart of Darkness' for example which, incidentally, is as good a parallel to this album from the book world as you'll find, especially in its cinema disguise of 'Apocalypse Now'. The song contains flamenco tango and brief choral moments. It's carefully composed, yet sounds completely improvised as if all the musicians were in different studios without a score. It makes for something that is supremely messy but gloriously creative. Each song builds to crescendoes within itself, surges of energy and catharsis.

There is nothing conventional here. Look elsewhere for singles. This calls to mind a return to the artistic freedom of the counter cultural 60s. You could listen to this a hundred times and hear something new each time.

My New Band Believe are part of the Windmill scene based around the Windmill pub in Brixton, and numbering The Last Dinner Party, Fontaines DC and Black Country New Road amongst their fellow members. If Jacqu Brel and Scott Walker were regulars they'd fit right in too.

They're a band whose every release is likely to be a happening, completely unclassifiable and probably totally brilliant.

Taster Track : Heart of Darkness

Angel In Plain Clothes : Angelo De Augustine

Best for : Anyone comfortable with songs for the dead

It's rare to find an album so immersed in death - the death of a pet, death via your own hand, death through disease, the death of a child. The list goes on. It's even rarer to find those songs dressed in the mourning clothes of such sweet melodies and arrangements.

This is chamber pop dedicated to the grave, although it softens gradually through the album to become an act of remembrance. It is all consuming and obsessive in its single minded exploration, a companion in life to Heathcliffe, Miss Havisham and The Day of the Dead. Augustine feels at home there.

He doesn't flinch in his approach. Try these brutal and violent lines as a taster.

"There's blood in the bath and blood in the hall" ('Mirror Mirror')

"Too sick for your mind to ignore" ('The Cure')

"Bury the needle past marrow and bone" ('Empty Shell')

It can be strong stuff, reinforced by the endless repeating melodies, like a music box you can't wind down. The sitar and droning guitars add to the atmosphere too. And yet, it's not a despairing place to visit. Those repeating melodies are gentle and could be drawn from folk nursery rhymes. The acoustic finger picking of 'Cosmic Ride' and the harp of 'The Universe Was Our Mother' are truly pretty, as is the poignant examination of the death of a child in 'Goodbye Baby Blue.' They feel both uncomfortable but soothing at the same time.

Angelo de Augustine has suffered loss and grief. Two other artists who have struggled with these and their own mental health are Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Augustine shares something of both, and his songs echo their pretty, heartfelt, introspective and a little tortured approach. He's less tough than Smith, but shares his gift for melody. He's a little more detached than Drake.

This isn't an album to allow you to feel comfortable, but it is an album that rewards your efforts with melody and style.

Taster Track : Goodbye Baby Blue

Rules of Love and War : Trampolene

Best for : Ambitious yet familiar indie rock

There's something good about Trampolene. They have the skill to populate an album with a string of three minute hit pop singles which, for many, would be enough. But they're ambitious to do more than that.

It's no longer fashionable to build a centrepiece song of more than six minutes in the midst of a collection of short indie gems, but they make a decent fist of it in 'Resurrection Concerto'. More surprisingly, they open with a poem set to music and repeat the trick several times across the album. If you need to show a more thoughtful and reflective side that doesn't fit within a traditional verse, chorus, verse, chorus structure, that's the way to go.

Trampolene capture the feelings from a world where growing up wasn't easy. 'Litany of Council House Mistakes' describes a world that's rough, unsafe, and day to day edgy. It's a world that's dimly lit by moments of refuge and love that are always there. That clear eyed approach is where the power rests in this album. The anger felt in 'And Still Blood Knows No Nationality' is real, and adds a sincerity and depth to words that might otherwise sound naive.

If the 'Shine' indie compilations that were everywhere at the end of the 90s were still around today, Trampolene would be one of their go to artists. They give you literate indie rock of the kind that paved the path into the 21st century when bands had something to say but wanted to keep things accessible. They have a pop sensibility that is as close to Keane as it is to the Libertines.

It's hard to dislike and difficult not to purr with pleasure at the sound of something reassuringly familiar delivered so well. Maybe they won't change the world, but their world is just fine to listen to as it is.

Taster Track : Sort Me Out

EPs and Songs

Alexxandre (aka Comett), Infinity Song, Sea of Days, The Greenberry Woods

Chatting to a man in the music biz recently, he mentioned that his work team have been told that over 70% of all new releases are AI generated. Another friend has openly admitted that AI generates the music that accompanies their lyrics. They've released two albums in four months. A third friend - don't worry, I'll be running out of friends soon - prefers not to listen to new music because he has enough music that he loves in his life already, going back to the Sixties. Whether or not you feel that AI music deserves to be treated as music, it's a real and growing issue for struggling acts to be heard above the mass of noise out there. That feels just wrong.

These thoughts came to me as I listened to Alexxandre's 'Nouveau Depart'. As far as I can tell, it's the only thing they've released. I can find nothing about them on line. The double X in their name seems very deliberate, a marker perhaps that all is not as it seems, but there is no way of knowing. As it is, I liked this song for its catchy twang, for the sense of deep longing it possesses wrapped up in the uniquely emotional tristesse of the French. I particularly liked how reminiscent it was of Comett's 'Beyond The Dark'. It turns out, that's not surprising as Alexxandre and Comett are the same person.It's all very confusing, and not helpful to those trying to navigate their way to great music!

'Whenever You Want Me To' from The Greenberry Woods is much more straightforward. It's a likable slice of American power pop that jangles its way straight onto a High School coming of age film soundtrack. If you think a classic pop song needs to be fully laden with harmonies, possess a proper chorus and feature 60s beat band handclaps, look no further.

'Pride' is a quite deliberate and considered shoegaze collaboration between Sea of Days with Maud Anyways on joint vocals. At first it seems an unnatural choice for a three minute single, quite heavy and weighted down. But just as a rose begins life as a grubby looking bulb before flourishing into something beautiful, repeated listens to 'Pride' will reveal its soothing lullaby qualities. It's a slow burner worth waiting for.

One of 2024's best pop albums came from Infinity Song, and they're back in 2026 with a new self-titled album in June. Expectations are set high and their first single from the new album does not disappoint. 'One Foot Out' possesses all the wonderful harmonies of its predecessor with, perhaps, more emphasis on their musical talent. It's as catchy as hell and offers the kind of addictive listening that creeps up on you unexpectedly in the middle of the day.