The Guardian Indie

1. Musical duo Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya: ‘Basically our music’s for losers’

   The Scandi stars were building separate careers in the US when a friend got them to team up. Now the pair have become an unlikely folk-pop powerhouse

   Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya’s collaboration was like a long-shot blind date, set up by a mutual friend who figured they’d make beautiful music together. Stiltz was an electronic composer and Kaya was a maverick singer-songwriter. Their recording session was almost scuppered when the producer skipped town before they arrived at the studio. But against all odds, the pair’s debut EP, Blurb, is a laconic treat of smart, vulnerable folk-pop in the left-field lineage of the Velvet Underground and Bill Callahan. “We clicked,” grins Kaya Wilkins, AKA Okay Kaya, “like the buckle on a belt.”

   They met in Stockholm, at Pitchers, which Stiltz describes as “a weird simulacrum of a British pub, decorated with wallpaper of bookshelves – a very strange, specifically Scandinavian place”. The unlikely duo share the Scandi thing in common – Stiltz grew up in Stockholm and now lives in California, while Wilkins was raised on Nesoddtangen, a remote peninsula outside Oslo, before relocating to New York when she was 19. “I moved from one peninsula to another,” Wilkins says. “New York was extremely different, and I’d desperately wanted it to be different. I’d come from a very small, very homogeneous place, and I wanted to be somewhere exciting and vibrant and diverse all over.”

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2. Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out review – stomps straight to the top of British punk’s table

   (City Slang)
   Championed by Iggy Pop and riot grrrl royalty, the Brighton duo pile on the jagged riffs, scabrous humour and swearing for their politically charged debut

   For the most part, Lambrini Girls’ debut album barrels along in roughly the style that’s hoisted the Brighton duo to cult success over the last few years. There are huge, distorted basslines courtesy of Lily Macieira and equally distorted guitar playing from Phoebe Lunny that flits between post-punk angularity and occasional bursts of poppier, Ramones-y chords. The rhythms are frantically paced, and there are lyrics that focus on societal ills, delivered in Lunny’s distinctive vocal style: she sings like someone angrily trying to make their point in a particularly noisy bar, as a bouncer struggles to usher them out of the door.

   Combined, this music has drawn appreciative nods from a range of forebears including Iggy Pop, Kathleen Hanna and Sleater Kinney’s Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein. Iggy is so enamoured of the duo that he got them to collaborate on a version of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus that appeared alongside tracks by Andrea Corr and Rick Astley on a Trevor Horn-helmed covers album: improbable company in which to find a band whose first EP arrived in a sleeve featuring a pile of shit on fire.

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3. ‘It’s all just very grimy and filthy’: Gregory Nolan’s photos of the 00s indie scene

   The photographer gathered 6,000 images he took at the era’s centre, which offer a hedonistic window into a pre-smartphone era that remains relatively undocumented

   “I literally got into this by accident,” says Gregory Nolan. “One night in 2004, I accidentally poured a beer over a girl and I got chatting to the guy she was with, who was starting a new club night that very weekend.” The guy in question was Jay McAllister, AKA the indie-folk artist Beans on Toast, who wanted some original artwork for the walls of his club. As an amateur yet aspiring photographer, Nolan offered his “subpar, A-level art photos”.

   Connections were made and this led to Nolan getting a gig photographing the weekly London indie club night Frog. Soon he found himself immersed, seven nights a week, in a world of sweat-soaked moshing crowds, dingy backstage rooms, sticky floors and mountains of Red Stripe. Nolan would capture the spotty faces of a burgeoning generation of indie musicians: the Killers, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Mark Ronson, Devonté Hynes and countless others. “It was nuts,” he says. “I never had any money, no one had jobs and we were all living on other people’s floors but I’d often be jumping on tour buses and going on crazy tours with bands.”

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4. Franz Ferdinand: The Human Fear review – stiffness sets in on stodgy sixth

   (Domino)
   Alex Kapranos and co are finally acting their age, but have lost their cool in the process

   For the most part, British indie-mania of the 00s involved a slew of sixth-form poets holding forth over amateurishly jerky guitars: the results were often simultaneously brilliant and deeply cringeworthy. Somehow, Franz Ferdinand managed to establish themselves as a tent pole of the scene while wholly bypassing the awkward young upstart vibe. Frontman Alex Kapranos was in his 30s when the band released their debut album, which combined sharp riffs with arch, arty posturing and lugubrious vocals. Kapranos and co were cooler than their contemporaries in both senses: their aesthetic was less messy and their lyrics less bracingly obvious, but they were also less sweatily relatable.

   If Franz Ferdinand were the grownups back then, 20 years on they’re positively avuncular. The Human Fear – their sixth album, and first since 2018 – feels markedly middle-aged in tone. Despite opener Audacious kicking off with Kapranos muttering about the disintegration of reality over a pleasingly grainy riff, the song then slows into the kind of sweeping, plodding chorus you could imagine Take That crooning on a teatime chatshow. Other songs (Bar Lonely, Tell Me I Should Stay) channel 70s glam to pleasant but unremarkable ends, while a track called The Doctor – told from the perspective of a man unwilling to vacate his hospital bed (“I have nurses to talk to … and thermometers to hold”) – doesn’t exactly telegraph vitality. There are even a couple of actively eye-watering moments, such as Kapranos singing the praises of a new paramour over Hooked’s novelty EDM-style synths. It’s safe to say that two decades on from their heyday, Franz Ferdinand have finally lost their cool.

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5. ‘We’ve been through the wringer’: Doves on addiction, breakdowns – and touring without singer Jimi Goodwin

   Their new album Constellations for the Lonely ranks among their best work. But as they prepare to go on the road, the Williams brothers talk about their momentous decision to play without Goodwin

   Just over four years ago, Doves were on the crest of a wave. Their first album in more than a decade – The Universal Want – had been rapturously received, helping them notch up their third UK No 1. All set to perform it live, the tour was suddenly cancelled due to frontman Jimi Goodwin’s mental health – he has since said he is in recovery from substance abuse.

   The cancellation “was heartbreaking for us because this is all we’ve ever wanted to do,” explains guitarist Jez Williams, who formed Doves with drummer brother Andy and schoolfriend Goodwin in Wilmslow, Cheshire in 1998. Sat alongside him in a Manchester eaterie, Andy explains: “You can get away with that once, but if we had to pull a tour again it would be curtains.” Thus, in late 2023, with a new album on the way, and Goodwin telling them he still wasn’t up to touring, they made the momentous decision to go on the road without him.

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