Shall we write a new editorial? Who needs a damn editorial let alone a new one? Who needs what? No time for editorials, let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing as last time once again, another five (or so) slices of music that have passed our way recently, five slices of music cherry picked for your delight and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of pears and here comes the editorial.

Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying swordfish out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Cake oil? Snake oil? Bake the oil, everything must go somewhere and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing, we never should have done and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery.

Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, skip this bit, there’s music further down the page, five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and what’s Wordsworth? Just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us on these Five pages we reguarly post?

Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, this time we start with more from our old friends from Sydney…

1: Party Dozen – Sydney’s Party Dozen (Kirsty Tickle and Jonathan Boulet) are set to release their AA-single 7″ ‘Mad Rooter / Ghost Rider’ on Dec 5th via City Slang. Today the band are sharing the second track from the record, a cover of Suicide’s Ghost Rider. More about Mad Rooter here

On the track, Party Dozen said “Suicide have always been one of our favourite bands. One time we saw Henry Rollins come out and sing Ghost Rider with them at the Barbican centre in London. No way. Way. We’ve been playing our version all year in our live show and we hope you turn this one up loud.”

Party Dozen are a band we’ve featured on these pages rather a lot…

ORGAN THING: Sydney noise makers and favourites around these parts, Party Dozen, are back with a new piece of music that you can hear right here…

ORGAN THING: The power of Sydney two piece experimental noise band Party Dozen in a proper East End of London boozer on a dark dank Friday night in November, who could resist?

2: Anolah featuring Hak Baker and a new single as part of Speedy Wunderground‘s constantly good 7″ single series (the physical single is out on 4th Dec) – “Today, genre-defying London artist Anolah has shared an adrenaline-fuelled new single titled Slack Line. The single features guest vocals from lauded London singer and poet Hak Baker and will be released on Speedy Wunderground as part of their 7” Single Series.

From an upbringing in the midst of many underground scenes, Anolah’s childhood was a whirlwind of city-hopping, sound systems, performing and creating. Now firmly rooted in London, Anolah’s diverse experiences and encounters with unconventional characters and musicians from many backgrounds have been a wellspring of inspiration for her journey as a songwriter and instrumentalist”.

Speaking on the single Anolah says “Sometimes people get a little too confident in who they think you are and project that onto you. And it’s like babe we’re not married, I didn’t ask for your input so let me do me and you can do you.”

To celebrate the release of the new single, Anolah will play a release show on 8^th December at The Windmill in Brixton, London, tickets and details here. Find the single here.

3: Hen Ogledd – the collaborative project of artists Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington have just announced Discombobulated, their “confounding and haunting new album set for release on February 20th via Weird World”, here’s a rather strong piece from the new album to go with the news, by far the strongest thing the four have done so far and the first time we’ve shared anything from Hen Ogledd om these pages…

“It’s perhaps their most complex and emotionally charged record to date, involving meditations on political tumult, personal crisis and mental wellbeing in a world gone mad, yet also their most warmly inclusive and accessible.
 
“There’s something to Hen Ogledd that’s really not like a normal band,” says Richard Dawson. “It’s something… else.”

Hen Ogledd – named after the Welsh term for ‘The Old North’, the historical and political region encompassing what is now northern England and southern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages – coalesced slowly in the middle of the last decade. Davies and Dawson first began collaborating in 2013, but Hen Ogledd did not come fully into being until Pilkington and Bothwell were both involved ahead of 2018’s debut album proper, Mogic.

Third album Discombobulated marks a considerable step forward in their evolution. The initial sessions for the record took place in early 2024, having been ‘rallied’, in Rhodri Davies’s words, by drummer Will Guthrie to get into a room together to develop the various ideas each member had. Living in different parts of the UK, Hen Ogledd often have to share sketches of music remotely before coming together to hammer them into shape; often, as on this record, with producer Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle.
 
Along the way, the record was opened up to an extensive cast of contributors. We hear the voices of friends’ and band members’ children, field-recorded horses and insects courtesy of Chris Watson and David Reid, and the supple drumming of Will Guthrie; there are spoken word contributions from the likes of Matana Roberts, Truly Kaput, C. Spencer Yeh and Circle’s Janne Westerlund (in Finnish naturally); saxophone from Fay MacCalman, trumpet from Nate Wooley and flute from Davies’ daughter Elliw.
 
“Maybe Hen Ogledd is more like a family than a band,” says Sally Pilkington. “There’s something really special about having kids’ voices in the music.
 
Yet it would be a mistake to characterise Discombobulated as familial in the twee-est or safest senses of that word. A quiet radicalism and fury at injustice is woven into much of its lyrical and thematic content. On the first single to be shared Scales will fall, Dawn Bothwell’s urgent vocal leads the charge with her allusions to both protest history – the women at Greenham Common and Durham Miners’ Gala – and contemporary organising against corporate greed. Her vocal performances are among the record’s most striking, charismatic features. “Although I love hip hop, I want to make it clear that I’m drawing more on the spoken word tradition. I made up this term ‘Bard rap’; that’s more how I think of it.”
 
In the video for Scales will fall – directed by James Hankins – Bothwell is positioned as an “alternative populist leader,” she jokes, wearing a blue alien power-suit and provoking a gang of kids to rebel”.

More details: Website / Album links / Bandcamp

4: Lifeguard – “Early next year, Chicago’s Lifeguard will release a new 7” maxi single, Ultra Violence / Appetite. Recorded at the band’s rehearsal space / studio, the 11-track, 13-minute release featuring lead tracks Ultra Violence and Appetite, continues the unstable ethos of this year’s much-loved debut album Ripped and Torn – alternating high-velocity punk-energies with surreal dub-inflected interludes”. Listen to Ultra Violence here….

Did we ever get around to reviewing that Lifeguard album from earlier this year? It was and is a good one, we did feature several tracks. We better catch up with ourselves before the year ends and we and they, the three piece band from Chicago, get on to their offering early next year that so far on the strength of that one track sounds rather positive….

5: Winged Wheel have a third album, Desert So Green, on the way in January 2026, so far they’ve let out a couple of tracks, you can hear them both on the album’s Bandcamp page. Winged Wheel is Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint), Matthew J. Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack & Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek). The band have just announced a European tour for a large part of January, although they haven’t included any UK dates (yet?)

“Winged Wheel is a creatively and geographically scattered collective, with each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group’s interpersonal alchemy.

Early long-distance file trading between a few members yielded 2022’s debut album, No Island. As awareness and buzz grew around the band, they expanded their membership and met in person for the sessions that became 2024’s Big Hotel, a surgically assembled murk of high-energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies. Fast forward, and the band that started out as a passing idea has completed multiple tours, become a taper’s dream with sets that drift through structure and improvisation, and ridden the momentum to places unforeseen on their third album, Desert So Green.

Following a run of shows across the Midwest in the spring of 2025, the group settled into a studio on the outskirts of Chicago to track. Though the full lineup had only been solidified for a little over a year at this point, time together on stage led to a quickly expanding sound and a unified vision. To this end, Winged Wheel spent hours refining flashes of inspiration into coherent songs. Leaning into deeper experimentation, the band uncovered new dimensions and contrasting atmospheres. The arrangements are dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional. It’s an album that teeters between excitement on one side and anxious tension on the other.

Indeed, Desert So Green represents yet another transformation for Winged Wheel, one that takes them into a space of sharpened dynamism and more nuanced expression. Things move a little slower, and the aftershock hits harder than the initial adrenaline rush. The energy that arrived all at once in loud explosions on earlier albums is refracted here, and ultimately all the more transcendent.

In January 2026, Winged Wheel will tour Europe for the first time, while North American tour dates will be announced shortly”.

And while we’re here, a couple of bands we really haven’t ever needed to be covering on our pages, two of the finest bands though, two bands who shared those bass lines of Mani…

From the Hammersmith Apollo gig of 24 November 2006 released on the ‘Riot City Blues Tour’ DVD in 2007. One of the best incarnations of Primal Scream (including, of course Mani on bass and the impossibly youthful Barrie Cadogan on lead guitar).

and, yes this is the one with that base line (and of course). R.I.P Mani…