Noel Gardner’s latest crop of new Welsh music reviews from the margins of May goes around the stylistic houses – from reborn Cardiff techno geezer DJ Guy to fuzzy Snowdonian psych from Worldcub, plus eight. So crank it up!
DJ GUY sets us adrift on early 90s-style techno bliss
This 14-track album by electronic producer Guy Evans aka DJ Guy, Inspiration Dance Vol. 2, succeeds a similarly-titled 12-strong album released last September, as reviewed in that month’s new Welsh music roundup. It’s not entirely clear how either volume has come together – that is, whether they’re conceived as ‘artist albums’ or simply collect Evans’ personal favourite tunes – but it’s another very strong set from a Cardiff dance music stalwart whose return to production after a long time laying low continues to bear fruit. By no means uniform in BPM or mood, ID2 does nevertheless shine brightest when showcasing Evans’ ability to wed unorthodox, energetic rhythms to more soothing synth melodies, with mid-album moments Time Is Ascending and Outwards Inwards two standouts.
DOUBTSOWER brings drum’n’bass wisdom to doom/horror-metal
The third album by Matthew Strangis as Doubtsower, scratching his experimental/extreme metal itch, continues the cross-contamination of his tastes that had been apparent on multiple previous releases reviewed in these new Welsh music columns. His drum’n’bass alias Kyam has absorbed certain leftfield rock elements and while Doubtsower’s first album was all doom guitar and gothy organ, the second introduced synths and programmed drums. Now, on Trampled Ideals Sold Cut-Price – the first of six tracks on the album, titled Nothing Reduced To Everything, the breakbeats are front and centre, and smartly positioned. The rest of the album doesn’t follow suit but neither is it trad doom, rather a pleasingly experimental and atmospheric reading of the genre: The Burnt Witch Of Civilised Behaviour, which closes the album, is very much my sort of avant-horror.
For their third album, GROUP LISTENING switch from reinterpreters to composers
“Let’s see where the wind takes us,” said Stephen Black of Cardiff duo Group Listening to Buzz two years ago, on the release of their second album of covers (they might term them ‘reinterpretations’ or similar) and to the question of if we’d ever hear any original compositions by this project. Now, with third LP Walks (Prah), Black and bandmate Paul Jones have delivered nine examples of just that. Wholly instrumental but bearing a psychogeographical theme, Group Listening are gentle and aqueous in their sound design, with keyboards, harpsichord and Black’s pastel-shaded clarinet moving amongst each other with chess-like precision but, also, an unmistakable humanity.

New producer MOOD$ offers frisky post-jungle tearouts
Mood$ is a fella named Louie Rees who lives in Cardiff, makes jungle-adjacent edits and originals, and DJs on internet radio and occasionally for a live audience too. That’s pretty much all I know about him but I’m well into Take It Back, the three-track EP he recently released through Midi Cartel. Sometimes he seems to be harking back to first wave jungle with his breakbeat style, as on the intro to the title cut, but more often this stuff slots in with latterday producers like Sherelle and Special Request who offer their own slant on that sound – Midi Cartel mention a footwork influence, which is probably located on The Temple if anywhere.
Noisier, punkier, gothier – OBEY COBRA smash it on album two
There aren’t many bands for whom this is the case now, on account of me being old and out of touch, but Obey Cobra are a band I’ve witnessed evolve from their very beginning, which was two guys and a desktop PC onstage under a different name. Once becoming an actual band, they were good very quickly, as was their debut album, but Mwg Drwg, its successor, is a proper scorcher: as psychedelic as before, I’d venture, but way more punk-coded, noisier, gothic, more irate-sounding too. The studio – that of Wayne Adams, who knows how to record this sort of thing – is used well, and more than previously, and the Rocket label really backed a winning horse by picking this up for release.

Laura ‘Tender Prey’ Bryon returns as PICKLE HEAD
Round about now it must be 20 years since Laura Bryon started making music (and sharing it with the likes of me), which is both nice and scary to think about. What’s even changed since then? For Laura, quite a bit: having sung in Cardiff postpunk band King Alexander, then solo as Le B and Tender Prey, she did youth work in Borneo for several years and is starting again as Pickle Head after settling in Brighton. Millennial Falcon, a six-song EP, is the debut release under that name and more synth-based than Tender Prey was: Deeper Thinker stands out for its pivot to a brisk punk style, but Pickle Head’s minimalist lo-fi pop approach is suitable and endearing backing for an introspective lyrical tack.
Welsh rapper RAZKID isn’t scared of vulnerability on comeback EP
When Razkid was a newer name on the Cardiff rap scene circa the late 2010s, he looked like he was on the up; Welsh Weather, his new six-track EP, is his first substantial release since 2018. A single, Workers Hands, was slated as a taster of it when uploaded in early 2023 but isn’t anywhere to be seen, possibly because it doesn’t quite fit with what has actually manifested. Dank, dubby grime rhythms – impactful, but feeling more tailored to headphones than club speakers – are bedrocks for some of the most candidly doubt-plagued and, let’s just say it, emo lyrics you could hope to hear in this genre. It’s affecting stuff, to be clear, and Razkid makes room for neat similes and funny left-of-centre imagery all the same.
Cardiff noiserockers SHLUG get noisier on new EP…
Cardiff’s Shlug are one of a few noiserock-ish bands of twentysomethings in the city, and the noisiest of them all based on my collective exposure. Split The Grin, a self-released four-song EP, has occasional bursts of tempo akin to 1980s American hardcore and a guitarist whose brutish take on a goth-rock tone and severe solos (notably on January Ink, the final track) leads me to suspect the influence of The Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. Elsewhere the group combine a dense chug with an near-industrial rock sound – although I don’t think there are any synthesised sounds in the sense one’d normally use that term – and vocalist Ellis Acton-Dyer combines a sort of haughtily amused anger with bursts of surreal lyrical imagery.
…while Cardiff noiserockers SLATE refine and expand their sound
The first ‘big vinyl’ release from Slate, a somewhat youthful Cardiffian quartet, arrives five months after their debut 7” wound up in one of these new Welsh music lists: a healthy schedule, redolent of a bygone era much as their music (kinda) is. Deathless (Brace Yourself) spans six songs and 25 minutes, and set against their pre-Christmas single sees the band taking a turn for the dramatic. Some of EP opener Remoter Heaven’s scrawly tunings gave me a Pavement vibe, and there’s what feels like a lunge towards mathrock twiddle on Shade In Me, but when Jack Shephard sings it’s a whole other story – a Buckley/Bradfield bigness has appeared without a lot of prior warning. It’s made Slate’s sound more distinctive than I would have previously predicted, and will hopefully stand them in good stead going forward.

Snowdonians WORLDCUB are the latest in a long lineage of Welsh psych-rockers
This four-piece, their location listed nowhere more specific than Snowdonia, have been going maybe two years under the name Worldcub and a few longer as Castles, their old moniker. On the strength of Back To The Beginning, their debut album as Worldcub, this tropical garage psych mode constitutes a fairly clean break with their old incarnation, though their bio material still eagerly lists all their achievements as Castles so who knows. The 14 songs that comprise this album is probably three or four too many, though that’s not to say there’s many dips in quality, with guitars that jangle and stab in varying quantities and tasty fuzz organ. This has been an identifiable ‘Welsh sound’ for at least the last 30 years.
words NOEL GARDNER