Scottish New Music Round-up: August 2021

With live gigs firmly in our sights, this month brings new music from Andrew Wasylyk, Post Coal Prom Queen, wor_kspace, Nun Habit and more

Preview by Tallah Brash | 09 Aug 2021
  • Andrew Wasylyk

It’s August! The Edinburgh festivals are here, and music festivals across the country are underway. It’s a hard thing to get our heads around, but it’s exciting nonetheless. In the world of Scottish new music releases, well, they are still coming in thick and fast, the possibility to play new music in a live context drawing ever-nearer for most. At two ends of the spectrum you’ll find CHVRCHES and swim school, the former releasing Screen Violence (27 Aug), their excellent fourth album, ten years into their career, while the latter release their exceptional debut EP, making sense of it all (20 Aug), hoping for a long and fruitful future in the industry. Interviews with both can be found in our August issue, out now.

Andrew Wasylyk

Andrew Mitchell, who performs as Andrew Wasylyk, is also releasing a brand new record this month (20 Aug). Balgay Hill: Morning in Magnolia will be the fifth solo record from the Idlewild bassist, and second since his 2019 SAY Award-nominated record, The Paralian. Taking inspiration from early morning walks around Dundee’s 19th-century Balgay Park, listening to the album makes you feel as if you're almost floating through beautiful leafy greenery on low-lit mornings, not quite awake, birds twittering as you go, the shuffling of other early risers.

For Mitchell, Balgay Park acted as a safe space when the world was in disarray, somewhere to escape. While hopeful and leaning on the optimism found at the start of a new day, there’s still an element of unease to be found in sombre instrumentation and subtle chord changes on tracks like Through the Rose Window, Sun Caught Cloud Like the Belly of a Cat and Western Necropolis Twilight. Such is the dreamlike quality of Balgay Hill: Morning in Magnolia, you’ll have to pinch yourself when listening to make sure you’re not asleep.

Post Coal Prom Queen

Pinching yourself when listening to Music for Hypercapitalists (6 Aug), the brand new concept album from Post Coal Prom Queen is a must, too, just to make 100 percent certain you’re not in an episode of Black Mirror. The opening skit, What Brought You Here Today?, invites you to interview for a job at PCPQ Industries for the unpaid position of Junior Intern Assistant Hypercapitalist, the preliminary stage of a seven-stage process that side-eyes the outrageous expectations employers have in this day and age; Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test also gets a nod so replicants beware!

Concept aside, connected by a series of automated questions, responses come in the form of collaborative songs featuring a slew of talented rappers (Conscious Route, Empress, Jackal Trades, Somnia, Miles Better, Texture), taking PCPQ down a path they’ve not – not knowingly to us anyway – explored before, and it works exceptionally well. Still steeped in the world of sci-fi and humour that Post Coal Prom Queen love, Music for Hypercapitalists sees the pair manage to stay musically true to themselves, albeit with a hip-hop twist, on this exciting new record, which you can access via a QR code on a packet of noodles, with all proceeds going to Glasgow’s Refuweegee charity.

wor_kspace, Nun Habit

Previously a member of both Teenage Fanclub and BMX Bandits, Finlay MacDonald’s new ext_ended play EP (6 Aug) under his wor_kspace moniker has a touch of science fiction about it too, not only in its glitchy compositions and bending synths but also in the fact it samples voices and electromagnetic noise from archive recordings of people who are no longer with us: “musique concrète collaborations with the dead”, as the press release so perfectly it sums up.

Despite mining its samples from a multitude of places, and working across both analogue and digital technologies, there’s a lightness of touch and comforting familiarity across ext_ended’s five tracks that effortlessly binds it all together. And imbolc’s upbeat Dan Deacon-esque throb makes us want to run around in a frenzy hugging people (we obviously won’t, not yet anyway), perhaps as MacDonald had intended: “I felt this track had that cautiously optimistic feel [...] It is also relevant that it comes out at this point in history when we are hopefully seeing the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

With one member firmly based in Glasgow while the others are in London – “I'm working on them!” bandmember Greg tells us via email – we're also excited about queer five-piece Nun Habit's debut album, hedge fun, this month (2 Aug). Produced by Ric James (Yassassin, Foals), the band list everyone from Chastity Belt and Fleetwood Mac to Dry Cleaning and Art Brut as influences, but listen closely and you’ll hear snatches of Franz Ferdinand, Moloko, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Teleman and Interpol in their delightful brand of fuzzy garage rock. 

The mundane storytelling found over the jangly instrumental plod of album midpoint, Jeremy’s Horses, is an unexpected and hilarious left-turn, while the ‘Shall we go for a drink’ refrain on TinderHingeHer, and indie-disco bop Soap and Cigarettes both have us longing for the dancefloor.

Elsewhere, the first Hen Hoose release proper arrives on 11 August in the form of Monochrome, a collaborative single between Emma Pollock and Pippa Murphy; Berta Kennedy releases Free-Swimming (13 Aug), and SHEARS releases her brand new pop banger Afterthought (4 Aug), mixed by Matty Green (Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga).