LOYLE CARNER gets confessional on socially-conscious third album, HUGO
Loyle Carner’s third full-length release, Hugo, and first since the pandemic, reveals his deeper, more overtly introspective side.
alex payne
GIVEAWAY: MMA’s Professional Fighters League smacks down in Wales – here’s your chance to go for free
MMA fans are in for a treat this August: the PFL is bringing a double-bill of welterweight and heavyweight playoffs to the UK – starting in Cardiff, and we've got a bunch of tickets up for grabs!
THE TRIBE: a haunting & entertaining crónica of extraordinary Cuban life
Carlos Manuel Àlvarez has smuggled an important ethnographic work inside the form of an entertaining and well-written crónica.
WU-TANG legend RAEKWON reflects on career highlights – and lowlights – in new memoir
In his new memoir, Raekwon openly valorises himself for his achievements but is equally willing to lay his mistakes bare.
THE INTIMATE RESISTANCE: philosophical musings that intrigue and confound
Josep Maria Esquirol seems to make a deliberate effort to write as convolutedly as possible in The Intimate Resistance.
Snobbery and the supernatural haunt Robert Irwin’s THE RUNES HAVE BEEN CAST
The Runes Have Been Cast is another strong offering from Robert Irwin in which the snobbery ends up being scarier than the supernatural.
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE
In between titles offering broadsides against, respectively, bad food on trains and Welsh neoliberalism, we find novels about Turkish gangsters in London, a world without working electricity and a man who get uploaded into his group chat...
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE
Relationship drama, an experimental Welsh novel, Greek mythology updated for the celeb era, the cultural implications of Chinese ear-cleaning and an illicit tryst in a summer house...
BEYOND THE BORDER | FESTIVAL REVIEW
Alex Payne dives into the wide world of live storytelling at Beyond The Border, a Carmarthenshire festival making a triumphant return for 2021, witnessing the likes of Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita, Will Pound and Stars And Their Constellations.
THIS WEEK’S NEW ALBUMS REVIEWED | FEATURE
BEARTOOTH Below (Red Bull) Once a mere solo project for the band’s lead singer Caleb Shomo, Beartooth has exploded into a titan of the melodic hardcore genre in a matter …
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK? Paul B. Preciado [trans. Frank Wynne] (Fitzcarraldo Editions) In 2019, Paul B. Preciado [pictured, top – credit Marie …
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE
THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE CWEN Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail) Women have daringly populated a lonely archipelago off the coast of Britain, dominating all aspects of what …