Watching The World With A Foggy Brain Through Misty Eyes
Bloc Party / The Other Two, Carla dal Forno, The Cat's Miaow, Everything But The Girl, Fred Und Luna / Pria, The Gentle Spring, John Mouse, Josh Rouse, Matilda Mann, San Cisco
Indie's back!
Kismet : Matilda Mann
Best for : The joy of being in love
'Kismet' is a dangerous album. It captures the bliss of new love and promises it to everyone, like a drug that can banish blues and smooth out bumps in the road. This is music for a fairytale free of doubt, cynicism and heartache. It's a threat to the established way of seeing things and exactly what the world needs today.
From the start this sets out to be a happy album about love. It's a rarity, filled with the same good energy as Olivia Dean telling us to be nice to each other and Pharrell Williams showing us how to be happy whilst processing down the street. Hear this and you'll be well on the way to buying your partner flowers, writing your name around a heart drawn in the sand and engaging in helpless acts of PDA without a care in the world.
This is an album that has found the centre of pop's magic, allowing the sun to break through a grey, damp November day. It flies by, like a kingfisher flying low along the river and providing a sudden flash of unlooked for joy. Melodies fall all around you like confetti or cherry blossoms blown from trees in the March winds. Her use of brass contains warmth and nostalgia. Her strings glide along and support you like a giant floating hammock.
'Chain Reaction', Imagine That Now', 'Make Up' and so many others display a gift for natural pop that can't easily put a foot wrong. They're the definition of sweet music. 'Lovely' is exactly that. You'd need a heart of stone not to share in the joy of being in love, even if you're the old, wizened sort that would normally cringe at the thought of expressing it.
There's a lot of ugliness in the world at the moment. Matilda Mann gives you a reason to believe it can be made radiant once more.
Taster Track : Chain Reaction
Confession : Carla dal Forno
Best for : Chamber post punk for the lonely soul
This is different, a mix of downtempo electropop with post punk basslines, a slow dublike pace and a melange of strings, woodwind and musical quirks. It's not perfect, but it is one of the most promising albums of 2026.
Carla dal Forno recently moved from the big city to a smaller provincial town. It's that culture shock that sets the tone for this album. She has time to think her inescapable thoughts without distraction. Her songs contain a fidgety restlessness embedded in a morass of slow pace and heavy bass. It's an intriguing and unexpected mix.
Cumulatively there's a risk that this combination could drag you down with it, a sense that she's wallowing in introspective boredom. Any emotion could feel a little empty and dead. But here, there's always something to prick up the ears and trigger feelings of delight that she has pulled off something unexpected, such as the bassoon that adds grace to 'Nighttime'. She has a knack for hooks and melodies that never leaves her. They are like a bud perpetually on the cusp of blossoming.
Enjoyable though this is, it can feel as if she's allowing herself to wallow in her thoughts. It would be great to hear her on a good and happy day. Instead the feeling is of music suited to daybreak after a night where sleep failed to come easily.
'Going Out', which opens the album, is haunting, dominated by a bass line that takes you to places you don't want to go with ghosty strings adding an ethereal feel. 'Confessions' has a more playful feel, its reggae lilt colliding with post punk to good effect. 'Drip Drop' is a surprising instrumental, a formal chamber dance enlivened by bleeps from the naughty girl at the back of the orchestra. In a definitive critical judgement, both 'Blue Skies' and 'Alone With You' lift the mood a little simply because they fill the spaces with additional notes. 'Off The Beaten Track' brings a touch of Young Marble Giants to the show, and it's a delight.
Douglas Adams once wrote a book called 'The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul'. He may have been listening to Carla dal Forno, quirkiness and all, at the time.
Taster Track : Going Out
Museums and Women : Josh Rouse
Best for : The contented songs of a lovely man.
Do you want music to challenge, thrill and excite? Or are you looking for something to help you relax and feel the warmth of being in a good place in life? The honest answer depends on how you are day by day. If today is your day for contentment, Josh Rouse is your man.
He's been to dark places in his life and career. We should give thanks for his safe return, rooted in an interest in ordinary life and what feels like a settled domestic situation. If you were to draw a picture of Rouse from these songs, it would show a contented man, at ease with his craft and feeling he can do what he does well and has nothing left to prove. He shows that great songs don't always need to come out of suffering.
These songs belong firmly in BBC Radio 2 territory. There's nothing wrong with that. This is relaxed, older man songwriting perhaps. If we get literary about it, a rebirth akin to 'Spring'.
It's 21st century easy listening, melodic and undemanding. It also has you wondering where these new tunes have been hiding. They're classic songwriting, so how haven't these melodies and arrangements been discovered and used before? Well, you may feel you've heard the title track 'Museums and Women' fairly recently. Skip back to 'January Sky', the second track on this album. You'll notice the similarity, even if you have cloth ears full of wax. Josh is not one to waste a good idea or a successful tune, but then neither did the Beatles with 'Revolution 1' and 'Revolution 9' on The White Album
'Wanderlust' and others remind us that songwriting is an art and craft. It doesn't need to be a manifesto, or a journey into self discovery. The whistling it contains draws out the warmth that nestles at the heart of all these songs.They're drawn from ordinary life. 'Parnell Street' documents what he observed looking down from a window. There's a pleasant, homely Spanish vibe to songs such as 'Sunday In The Country' where he now lives.
Josh Rouse is part of a cadre of elder statesmen in songwriting circles. He brings warmth where Ron Sexsmith delivers a kind of sweet melancholy and Nick Lowe now supplies his love of Buddy Holly and gently skewering humour.
This album marks a return to form with a consistently strong set of songs.
Taster Track : January Sky
When You Smiled and Turned Away : The Cat's Miaow
Best for : The happiest discovery of 2026
Today started out as a very good day indeed. The Cat's Miaow released their first new music in nearly 30 years. I'd never heard their music before this morning.They have one of the most indie names I've ever heard. They've also nailed the indie sound and its heartbeat.
It's said that the past is a different country. The Cat's Miaow grew up in Melbourne, but they're from May 1992. Stumbling across them was like travelling to a dusty 90s record shop and stumbling across a host of Sarah Records records, Cherry Red archives and unreleased Young Marble Giants albums that you never knew existed.
This album gives you 14 songs in just 30 minutes. It never feels rushed, nor does it ever feel too much of a good thing. It's a treasure trove of exquisite indie gems, small songs rooted in suppressed emotions that would otherwise overwhelm you. They're full of choked and trembling melodies that make sense of complex thoughts and feelings. They may sound subdued and introverted but they are beautiful moments capturing the essence of young emotions. Never over dramatic, these are by and about people with boyfriends, girlfriends and ordinary lives that affect them deeply, and feel emotions that leave scars and bruise.
I know some of you will be thinking that these are the twee musings of sensitive souls. You're wrong. First, they're too sincere for that. Secondly, here are the lyrics from 'Try and Pretend' that close the album.
" And I'll piss on your grave each night, each night,
You know I will, you know I will"
They shock.
This is indie as it was born to be. It's lo-fi and natural. It has the impact of The Field Mice and the earliest songs of Everything But The Girl. 'When You Smiled and Turned Away' is an album that sent me immediately to their back catalogue. It inspired gratitude that somewhere, somehow, this music lives.
It's perfect.
Taster Track : All of them. (I'll pick one at random for the Pop In The Real World 2026 Taster Track playlist, and for the video clip above.)
Ynys Park Memorial 1854 - 1976 : John Mouse
Best for : In your face, poetic synth pop
John Mouse has personality. In an age where artist bios concentrate on corporate pedigree and bland statements, Mouse prefers to clear up any possible confusion between him and American musician John Maus, reggae practitioner John Mouse and the Roger 'Mr Men' Hargreaves' storybook character, also called John Mouse. I like that. It's refreshing, and so is his album.
The feeling that comes through in these songs is of a character who wants to do a lot more in life than simply blow the bloody doors off, preferably in inappropriate circumstances. There's a pent up energy in the songs that wants to explode free of its surroundings. It's less introspective bedroom pop and more a seedy and squalid bedsit pop. At times it feels as if there is too much stuff involved and not enough space. Allow it to overwhelm you and you'll find much to enjoy.
Musically this sounds as if it is played on an old style synth that you might have stumbled across in a second hand shop, but without an instruction manual. It's a DIY synth pop, not a pre-programmed one.
There's an urgency to the music and humour to the words. Try the exasperated tone of 'Welsh Words' to hear it in action. The exultant prospect of 'Fly Fishing' is manic and over the top, set to a messy, squelchy synth and delivered loudly in spoken word poetry. It introduces a strange, distinctive mix reminiscent of John Cooper Clarke, Yard Act and Black Country New Road's 'Sunglasses'. The rest of the album takes it further. There are songs here such as 'The Man Down The Road' that take a seedier tone, flavoured with a little menace. There are gentler moments too. The bubbly rise and fall of 'Meet Me At The Tennis Courts' is at odds with the resentful lyrics. '20 Summers Left' is more reflective and acts as a spur for the urgent need for action.
John Mouse may bear the name of a timid rodent, but his music boils with the spitting rage of a wild, trapped tomcat.
Taster Track : Fly Fishing
EPs and Songs
Here's a selection of new songs evenly split between electronica and indie pop, and a wonderful return to acoustic glory for one legendary act. Let's start with them.
(Bloc Party, Everything But The Girl, Fred Und Luna, San Cisco, The Gentle Spring)
When Everything But The Girl returned to music making with 2023's 'Fuse' they opted to follow the electronic route that Todd Terry almost accidentally diverted them down with his 1995 remix of 'Missing'. They're a great electronic pop band, but deep down I've always cherished them for their sincere and emotional acoustic pop.'Young and Dumb' is a welcome return to this side of them, and it's their finest hour for some time. This has a Latin vibe and a melody that's infused with regret for missed opportunities and simmering frustration at what time has taken away from them. Think Carmen if she'd made it into her 60s and wanted her wild days back. The vocals on this song are wonderful, and raise hopes for their new album out next year.
Both the electronic pop songs are remixes. Pria's remix of Fred Und Luna's song 'Ich Steck den Kopf In die Wind' is a surprise and, bluntly, a disappointment. Whether it's a change of direction for the mannequins, or a style statement from Pria I don't know, but its darker club vibe is unexpected. It loses the hypnotic pulses and addictive melodies of their last album which were its greatest strength. It's just about OK, but doesn't reward the anticipation.
Better is The Other Two's remix of Bloc Party's 'Now We Can't Be Friends'. The Other Two are the ones from New Order that no one remembers.) It's better because its propulsive and brooding beat is accompanied by a more than decent melody. Stephen and Gillian have, mischievously perhaps, turned Bloc Party into New Order for the day. The result is something both bands can regard as a success.
Australian indie-pop band San Cisco return with 'Miles Away'. It's a credible stab at pleasing the algorithms that populate playlists. It's a welcome slice of teen rom-com indie pop and all about the chorus, which is a good one. Relationship problems have sounded or felt this sunny!
And finally… The Gentle Spring (The Field Mice by any other name) have released 'Down with Love'. It has the innocence, sentiments and feel of youthful romance cruelly dashed, but seen through the eyes of their more mature selves. It's upbeat and catchy, a musical smile of strummed guitar, reedy organ and snappy drum beats. I love it.