Scottish New Music Round-Up: July 2021

July is often one of the quieter times of the year for releases as it’s usually jam-packed with a busy festival calendar, artists more focused on playing live than putting out new tunes in the summer months. But in the absence of festivals, July is perhaps the busiest it’s been in recent years – in Scotland at least.

The second Record Store Day drop arrives on 17 July, with the most notable Scottish release coming from Glasgow-based soundsystem collective and dub connoisseurs Mungo’s Hi Fi, whose ten-track album Antidote they describe as “an antidote to all the stress and restrictions of modern life”.

Record Store Day aside, Scottish-Sudanese musician Eliza Shaddad releases her latest record The Woman You Want on 16 July. Read our full review in this month's magazine, out now. On 9 July The View’s Kyle Falconer releases his latest solo record, No Love Songs for Laura, and although we’ve not heard it in full yet, his most recent single – the pop-heavy Wait Around is such an earworm – and its accompanying music video definitely has us unexpectedly warming to his charms.

The ever-prolific Adam Stafford returns this month with Trophic Asynchrony, his latest album on Song, by Toad (9 Jul). Capable of myriad styles, it’s in the looping, building up and unpicking of instrumentation where Stafford really shines, as well as the unique way he manages to use his voice as an instrument. With its title inspired by “our relationship with nature at a time of intersectional crises” and “non-seasonal events due to climate change”, you can almost see the blizzards in summertime and daffodils at Christmas that he longs to depict here.

For the most part instrumental, across its eight tracks Trophic Asynchrony is cinematic and wholly engrossing, unfolding meticulously like the best stories captured on screen or in ink; fully invested from start to finish, you just want the best for its protagonist. At points dark, sorrowful and tense while others feel light and hopeful as they twinkle, you won’t want to turn away for a minute lest you miss something; a change in atmosphere, a twist of fate.

Glasgow musician and producer Clair also finds inspiration in nature, but on her debut album, Earth Mothers, the focus is firmly on its healing power. Set for release on 15 July via her own Hot Gem label, Clair turned to music-making in a much-needed time of catharsis following a difficult period in her life, and, if you let them, listening to the album’s seven tracks could offer the same restorative properties.

Earth Mothers is by no means a conventional record, but rather sees Clair bringing together more traditional instrumentation with a collection of unusual found sounds – sex toys, a mini sewing machine, a blow torch and jewellery-making tools all feature alongside an abundance of field recordings – to great effect. Despite the woozy nature of this record, there's an urgency beneath the surface that helps propel it forward, despite there being no notable beats, rhythms or song structures to cling to. But it's the buzzing insects, birdsong, wheezy harmonica, cat purrs, the crunching of leaves underfoot, sloshing water and lapping waves that help bring an effervescence to the record as they bob and fizz to the surface like a rejuvenating Berocca in a pint of water the morning after a heavy night.

Field recordings of birdsong and rivers can also be found on the beautiful Heart-Shaped Scars (30 Jul, SA Recordings), Dot Allison’s first album in 12 years. Recorded at Castlesound Studios in Edinburgh, four of the album’s tracks feature stunning string arrangements by the exceptionally talented Hannah Peel, but it’s Allison’s captivating, vulnerable and featherlight vocals that are knockout here.

If you're looking for a heavy dose of chiptune this month then Good Dog, aka Suse Bear, has you covered with their Journey to the End of the Jelly World soundtrack. Set for release on 2 July via OK Pal records, it accompanies a super cute 8-bit RPG game of the same name, created as a collaboration between Bear and Faith Eliott, and made possible thanks to a commission from the Glad Cafe’s Glad: Online project. Evocative of the journey the game might take you on, its twists and turns can be felt in every synth stab, chord change and ethereal shimmer across the record. Closer Congratulations (Thanks for Helping) is particularly jubilant, making you feel like you’ve won at life before you’ve even played the game. Pure joy.

Elsewhere, Glasgow’s wojtek the bear release their latest album, the warming heaven by the backdoor (16 Jul, LNFG); Linzi Clark releases her latest single Balancing Act (2 Jul), featuring more of the gorgeous vocals we’ve come to expect from the Paisley talent; on 9 July, Ayr’s rising star Bemz releases 26, his summer-ready collaboration with Rory James; on 16 July, Goodnight Louisa returns with the super catchy Get Your Hands Off My Girlfriend, while Katherine Aly unleashes the pulsing and retro-tinged Glow & Ignite. Finally, citing the likes of Slowdive and Joy Division as influences, Fife four-piece Sunstinger release their glorious and full-sounding Beyond the Frame EP (2 Jul). “It’s the sound we’ve been searching for these last few years,” lead singer Taylor Wright says. We’re glad you found it.

June releases you might have missed...

As has become tradition since we started our monthly Scottish round-up column a few months back, each month we attempt to provide a snapshot of what releases we missed in the previous month’s column. The amount of music coming out of Scotland by this point has become so outrageous that we’re having to dumb it down a bit to make it more manageable – we've even made a handy 15-track ICYMI playlist which you'll see below. 

A quick recap will allow us to highlight three lovely albums which arrived in our inbox too late for inclusion in last month's column – Highfield Suite from Glaswegian singer-songwriter Michael McGovern; Tender Hope from Glasgow-based musician and producer exit-omni, and Minor Thing from former-Edinburgh resident (now back in New Zealand) Miss Leading. Keeping things international, Bossy Love’s Amandah Wilkinson co-wrote and produced Arctic Love, the latest single from Greenlandic Danish artist Aviaja. And – apologies for the list-like nature that follows – back in the homeland a slew of singles that we very much enjoyed came from CHVRCHES (ft. Robert Smith), We Were Promised Jetpacks, Admiral Fallow, Swim School, Ask Alice, Walt Disco, Rianne Downey, Parliamo, Book Klub, Pizza Crunch, SHEARS, and Scottish-Chinese alt-pop star in the making, Rachel Lu, who performs under the moniker LVRA (pronounced Loo-rah), whose latest single Nightmare is the opposite of what it's title suggests and is a bona fide bop.

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If you want your music considered for review at The Skinny, or for inclusion in our monthly round-up column, email our music editor Tallah Brash on: tallah@theskinny.co.uk – please note: for album releases, we ideally need to hear from you a month or two in advance. Private streaming links are best. No attachments, please.