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Influential hardcore innovators Botch have delivered their electrifying new live album 061524, recorded at the iconic Showbox in Seattle on June 15, 2024—exactly 22 years to the day after their original farewell show at the same venue in 2002. 061524 captures a band still pushing sonic and emotional boundaries, now sharper, louder, and more dynamic than ever. Botch’s impact on aggressive music is undeniable. Their chaotic, math-laced brand of hardcore helped shape the genre’s landscape well after the band’s abrupt breakup in 2002.

For years, a reunion seemed unlikely—until a chain of unexpected events brought the original lineup back together for the band’s first new recording in over 20 years: 2022’s “One Twenty Two.” The song was released to critical acclaim, building into a frenzy of anticipation for Botch to reunite. What started as a nostalgic experiment quickly became a full-circle celebration, with the band reconnecting both personally and musically. That spark unleashed a wave of activity: secret warm-up shows, sold-out headlining gigs, and eventually a carefully curated international reunion tour, culminating in their hometown return at the Showbox—where 061524 was recorded in front of a packed, exhilarated crowd. 061524 is a blistering, unflinching document of a band reawakened—not as a legacy act, but as a vital force.

The album captures the energy, grit, and heart of a group that’s not only older and wiser—but more rehearsed and way more ambitious. The performances are tight but still full of the raw unpredictability that defined their early years. Fan favorites like “To Our Friends in the Great White North” and “Transitions from Persona to Object” are more complex and invigorating than ever before. Other songs, like “Afghamistam” and “Oma,” never considered feasible to pull off live previously, are delivered with the intricacy and intensity that has earned the band a lasting legacy and fresh legion of followers.

Lifelong friends Richard Lowe and Rob Bendelow formed their first band “Lammergier” during the mid 1970’s together with bassist Barry Yates. Following their first love performance in 1977 the band gigged extensively across the British midlands. The standard of these performances combined with their unique brand of symphonic rock saw “Lammergier” amass a large and loyal following. Then a new decade arrived changes were made, the music remained the same, but they called themselves “Saracen”.

After several months on the road Saracen decided it was time to record an album, and in October 1981 they released “Heroes, Saints and Fools” to critical acclaim. Saracen tracks received regular airplay on Tommy Vance’s Friday night rock show and the single “We have arrived” was recorded. In 1983 line-up changes occurred and the band eventually stopped touring in 1985.

Two decades later and the band re-appear with a vengeance and the release of “Red Sky” in March 2003 put the band firmly back on the map, and it was a rework of some of the old classics with new tracks added. The band regained its popularity, and a further three albums have emerged to critical acclaim, namely “Vox in Excelso”, “Marilyn” and “Redemption”.

With renewed interest in the vinyl format of recorded music “Vox In Excelso” has been re-released in 2025 as a numbered limited edition with new artwork and now “Red Sky” is to follow, again with new artwork. These are beautiful works of art and the recordings sound fresh and vibrant, its classic progressive rock brought into the present day and it doesn’t get better than this..

Released in 1962, "Etta James Sings for Lovers" came out during a time when Etta James was Establishing herself as one of the premier vocalists in the music industry

The early 1960s were a fertile period for soul and R&B music, and James was at the forefront of this movement. It's about an album collection of romantic ballads and standards that showcase her powerful and emotive vocal abilities: known primarily for her blues and R&B hits, this album allows her to explore jazz standards and love ballads, demonstrating her ability to convey complex emotions and connect with listeners on a deep level. The album features accomplished session musicians who provide a sophisticated and polished sound: Over the years, "Etta James Sings for Lovers" has been appreciated as a classic example of a signifcant part of her discography, beloved by fans for its timeless quality. The arrangements feature lush orchestration, with strings and horns providing a rich backdrop for James' vocals and at the time of its release, the album was well-received by critics who praised James' vocal prowess and the sophisticated arrangements.

Originally issued on Hut Records in October 2002, Human Conditions built on the success of Alone With Everybody, retaining the new fans he had gained with that record - This re-issue replicates the 2002 UK first pressing and is available on audiophile 180g double vinyl in gatefold sleeve.

"It's a beautiful world," sings Ashcroft on opening track and lead single "Check The Meaning". Its eight-minutes seem a culmination of all of Ashcroft's work to date – a haunting guitar figure, swelling strings, and subtle orchestration back a lyric that catalogues the battle of love over evil, ending with Ashcroft assuring the listener "It's gonna be alright." It is a powerful beginning to a powerful album. "Buy It In Bottles" maintains the introspection of "The Drugs Don't Work", a mood that can be also found on "Running Away" and "Lord I've Been Trying"; while "Bright Lights" and "Paradise" bring the anthemic rock.

When Brian Wilson guests on one of your albums, it suggests a certain status has been attained; Richard Ashcroft demonstrated that he could hold his own in such company; both are songwriters of the human condition, and the song Wilson appears on "Nature Is The Law", closes Human Conditions in stellar fashion.

Air Texture proudly announces its latest artist-curated compilation, “Hardwired,” assembled by Berlin-based musician JakoJako. This expansive collection celebrates the implicit connection between hardware-focused electronic producers, featuring contributions from Rødhåd, Acid Pauli, The Field, Neon Chambers, and many more.

“Hardwired” draws its conceptual foundation from synthesizer terminology. As JakoJako explains: “A hardwired synth has connections already soldered into the machine—it comes with certain functions without needing to patch cables externally. As a hardware producer, I feel whenever I meet someone who creates music as I do, we have this immediate connection, like a hardwired synthesizer. There’s no need for small talk—we can speak about gear.”

This metaphor of pre-established connections forms the emotional core of the compilation, celebrating the community of hardware enthusiasts who share an intuitive understanding and appreciation for machine-based music creation.

JakoJako has established herself as one of electronic music’s most intriguing voices, exploring the territory between technical precision and emotional expression. Her artistic approach balances rigorous knowledge with unrestrained intuition, creating works that reach beyond genre boundaries.

A Berghain resident with performances at Dekmantel and Fusion, to the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican, JakoJako has released music on prestigious labels including Tresor, Mute, and Leisure System, and crafted remixes for artists like New Order and Martin Gore. Her deep relationship with analog and modular synthesis, including her ongoing connection to Berlin’s SchneidersLaden, informs her distinctive sound.

Following her recent Mute album “Têt 41,” this curation for Air Texture provides further insight into the musical universe that has shaped JakoJako’s artistic vision.

“Hardwired” showcases 23 tracks for its digital release, with a select 9 tracks pressed to vinyl. The collection spans the spectrum of contemporary electronic music while maintaining cohesive focus on hardware-driven production approaches.

Highlights include collaborative works between JakoJako and fellow producers Mareena and Frank Wiedemann, alongside contributions from established artists like Rødhåd, Acid Pauli, and The Field, plus emerging talents representing the hardware renaissance in electronic music.

Founded by James Parker Healy, Air Texture emerged from New York City’s late ’90s rave scene, carrying forward the fundamental PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) ethos with a collaborative and curatorial focus. Air Texture has evolved from its roots in Manhattan’s club era and Brooklyn’s warehouse scene to embrace a global perspective, working with producers across diverse styles and regions worldwide through the label and its PLace: nonprofit series.

Composed, performed and produced by Cosey Fanni Tutti, the 9-track album moves between propulsive beat constructions and expansive electronic explorations, continuing themes from 2019’s acclaimed album TUTTI. It is a personal reflection; a sonic realisation of her life, drawing on her powerful inner resolve and expressing it through music. The album finds Cosey making sense of some very tough years, dealing with personal bereavements alongside swingeing world events that have impacted us all. Centring on her own strength and self will, the album’s two distinct sides – one rhythmic, one more meditative – are connected by an overwhelmingly positive mood.

She explains, “My overtone chanting on the track ‘Stound’ was part of that, tapping into the inner self, to the core of your being, emotionally, physically, allowing the sounds to permeate and soothe as well as create a sense of power, resistance and resilience to what we face.” Even in the more melancholic moments, there’s a lightness that she explains is an “acknowledgement that it’s alright to be sad, that’s part of life, but there is so much joy too in our memories of people we lose and in the moments we share with each other. Joy is our resistance.”

There are also threads from her most recent projects running through 2t2. Her latest book RE-SISTERS and the score she wrote for Caroline Catz’s film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes are acknowledged, most directly on ‘Threnody’ which is dedicated to Delia Derbyshire and Andy Christian, an artist friend of Delia’s. He sent Cosey an abstract drawing of the same name, created one night from an improvised evening where he drew while Derbyshire intoned and sang softly as she looked at the drawings, as if reading a score expressing how they made her feel. Cosey’s process and the different strands that make up her work form a totality of vision.

She goes on to say, “Once you get creating and listening, weaving, collaging sound it’s a wonderfully fulfilling feeling that takes you both out of yourself at the same time as essentially deep within.” The artwork reflects this idea that the album is a “sound cameo”, reflecting the light within the music, and the buzz of life that exists within all of Cosey’s work. Musician, artist and author Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and conventions through her work. As a founding member of the hugely influential avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle, one half of electronic pioneers Chris and Cosey, and as an artist channelling her experience in pornographic modelling and striptease, her work on the margins has reshaped the mainstream. Her first solo album, Time To Tell (1983) was followed by 2019’s Tutti and 2022’s Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. Her debut book, the Penderyn Music Book Prize shortlisted Art Sex Music, was published in 2017, followed by RE-SISTERS in 2022 (both Faber), which will soon get a Spanish edition.

3XL’s first new release in 2025 by Italian trio Cortex of Light is a synapse-tickling dose of classic FSOL-era world-building that takes in gloopy trance cooked down with sub-heavy, vaporous dub, mutant acid, breakbeat rave, Artificial Intelligence and a Mark Fell-style algorithmic brainmelt.

You'll know if you've spent any time following Piezo's output that the Milan-based producer and Ansia boss has a knack for lysergically enhancing any club template he sets his sights on. With releases on Idle Hands, Wisdom Teeth, Loefah's 81 and most recently Dekmantel, Luca Mucci has blottered up dubstep, hard drum, 2-step and minimal techno, here re-convening with fellow Milanese journeymen Aitch and primordial OOze/xàr num as Cortex of Light to blur those edges even further

'ILLUMINOTECNICA' isn't the trio's first release, but it's their most substantial and easily most developed. If 2024's 'Aeon Is A Child At Play With Colored Balls' showed off their aptitude for threading their luminous soundscapes into a horizontal soundtrack, then this album is a proper chance for Cortex of Light to show off their versatility in a different setting, matching dancefloor hallucinations with expertly sculpted sound design.

Psilocybin-tainted soundscapes scrape into breathy flute sounds and chest-thumping bass drops on the opener, haunted by a vision of electronic music that's been contrived in back rooms, squats and outdoor raves for decades at this point. Like so much of the rest of the 3XL catalog, there's a drive and coherence here that comes from classic dub techno and chill-out room fodder (think The Black Dog or Pentatonik), but always infused with something that dates it to the present era, be it a tactile sliver of Visible Cloaks-style neo-new age ambience, or a sort of mescaline-dipped take on Photek's bass-heavy, meticulously hazed 'Solaris' period downtempo gear, chopped 'n screwed into the uncanny.

The Australian master of the dark synth arts is back and – boy – he is out for blood.
We’ve been missing Marc Dwyer solo project Buzz Kull since his latest single Last In The Club from late 2019 and since back then we knew he was up to something. At first glimpse, the minimal wave days of We Were Lovers seem far away now that Marc has gone full Club Body Music with his upcoming new album, but there is a thread that binds Buzz Kull hits from the past such as Into The Void, Avoiding The Light and New Kind Of Cross with these ten new cuts: a thread of darkness proper to the most handsome man in the game and that’s here to stay.

Echoes of 90’s era Front 242 and Front Line Assembly will resonate from tracks like Fascination and Dead Inside; elements of early body music flirting with the dark side of British synthpop will rave from the grooves of Dancing with Machines and Man on the Beat, while late 80’s Belgian new beat cellar-like vibes rise from Do You See and Burn it to the Ground.

But Buzz Kull’s third full-length is not just about music subgenres we all know and love, it’s about a feeling that comes alive only with the dark and drives you through the small hours just to leave you drained and filled at once. The creature of the night is on the loose, the sticky dancefloor its natural habitat, its lust for the upside-down world of the club can’t be cured.

Peaceful electronic ambient and tribal echo environments. Music that explores feelings of calm, spirituality, and ceremony. Long-form voyages to temple meditations, “trips in search of something,” looking in as looking out.

The artist himself says: “This is an attempt to look into the heads and souls of "unnecessary" people, inconspicuous people, but striving to make the world a better place. People who have lost the horizon and the outlines of reality are desperate and stuck in the middle of nothing... people who cannot accept the rules of this world and unpleasant aspects of daily life, boring and unfair into unreality, other existence... it's all about escapism, rethinking their inner world, and discovering new facets of the soul.”

FFO Jon Hassell, O Yuki Conjugate, Bitchin Bajas, Laraaji, The Chi Factory…

"soft brushes of undefinable sounds and tropical field recordings that almost create ASMR-inducing vibrations in the minds of the listener" - Simon Eliasson

Following the cult success of the first 2 EPs, Common Saints presents the debut album "Cinema 3000", the theme continues, blending soul, funk, and psychedelic influences with the organic sound and rich instrumentation that Common Saints has become known for Conceived in 2020 by writer / producer Charlie J Perry the production approach for Commons Saints consists of him playing and recording real instruments in his London home studio. One mike for the drums, his beloved piano and amps up loud! The album encapsulates the old school recording approach and musicianship the discerning ear craves but with a more modern punch - a true sonic bath for all the connoisseurs out there. Think, UK"s equivalent to Tame Impala and Khruangbin.

Danilo and Liza Farba founded the band Farba Kingdom in Odessa, Ukraine. Like many other old port cities, it has always been a multicultural place – but also one of constant change. It is these rapid changes in living conditions that the duo processes musically – with a penchant for nostalgia as a protective shield for themselves and their audience. What does that sound like? Dark, electronic, and wavy.

In 2020, the band established this musical direction with their debut album "Німб": the desperation of post-punk, along with unsettling, crushing industrial vibes and well-thought-out hypnotic synth sequences. Listening to their music, one immediately conjures up the architecture of their hometown, where the mystical neo-Gothic style alternates with Soviet Constructivism. A visual experience that screams the hopeless sadness of this era to the world.

Danilo and Liza Farba are currently in exile in Romania.

Gilles Peterson presents International Anthem is a compilation chronicling the legendary London-based radio host, DJ, label head, curator and cultural impresario"s long-standing affinity for and interaction with artists and music from the Chicago-born record label International Anthem. The tracks on this compilation were chosen by Peterson via an extensive review of track lists from his broadcasts on BBC Radio 6 Music, Worldwide FM, and various syndicated radio programs. The compilation also includes a previously unreleased track recorded live on the Peterson-founded online radio station Worldwide FM. This album is released via International Anthem as part of their "IA11" series of releases and events - where the label celebrates their eleventh year of existence by looking back on their first ten years while establishing new standards for the next ten years.

6 months after the release of Ed Rain’s (one of Andrei Rusu, half of duo Khidja, solo projects) debut solo album ‘Met him on a Wednesday’, Malka Tuti records is presenting two Huge remixes for the title track’s collaboration with Fantastic Twins.On the A Side we have Pilooski on the banger duties. Heavy sub bass frequencies and edgy rhythms reminiscing of late 90s UK energies (but with a somewhat modern twist) push forward a dance track with a unique structure and unexpected sonic surprises. Big room IDM. Big Big Tip. On the flip side we finally managed to collaborate with one of our favourites Superpitcher. The Kompakt x Pachanga Boys x Hippie Dance xxx alumni is one of our all time favourite people and producers, and we are oh-so-happy that he joined us on this special ride.His interpretation of the track takes it into more “poppy” realms. The entire track is laid over a beautiful sub bass droney kind of bassline and the result is one of those “this has been on repeat the entire day” kind of songs. A melancholic hue paints the song with a ‘Happy-Sad’ kind of energy and gives it more emotional depth yet always keeps it playful.

How would you like to hear it? This project is the brainchild of Andy Baxter, a multi-talented musician and multi-instrumentalist from London. His recording career began in 2018 when he released his first album, Green, on Village Live.

Buoyed by this initial recognition by his peers, he quickly released a second self-produced opus the following year, entitled Dusk. But it was his third LP, Shapes, released by KingUnderground, that took him to the next level.

Conceived during the first period of confinement, Andy played almost every instrument on the album (a few musicians joined in here and there): drums first and foremost, his instrument of choice, but also bass, guitar, keyboards and even the flute, which he had just learnt at the time of the album's creation. Largely inspired by the library music of the 70s, including some of his mentors such as Piero Umilani, David Axelrod and Brian Bennett, the album is nonetheless resolutely modern. But there's no denying the cinematic atmosphere that emanates from his compositions.

From the opening track "We're From Nowhere", with its heavy, funky bass, you get the impression of being plunged into the Harlem blaxploitation of the heyday, and you can't help but see a musical nod to Roy Ayers' "We live in Brooklyn, baby". But you soon realise that far from being a nostalgic musician, Baxter also listens to his contemporaries like Khruangbin and BadBadNotGood, as can be heard on tracks like 'Leaves', 'Odysea' and 'Ikigai', with their atmospheric guitars and Fransesca Uberti's haunting backing vocals, which instantly invite you to travel and escape! But there are times when the mood gets a little tense, like on the more angst-ridden 'Villains', with its almost free jazz flights of fancy. Finally, his drumming also comes to the fore on the last track, 'Stay Free', with its Afrobeat rhythm reminiscent of a certain Tony Allen and evoking creative freedom as a common thread running through his values.

In nine tracks, Shapes takes us on a neo jazz journey that once again demonstrates the vitality of the English scene in this field for several years now! At the start of 2022, Robohands released their latest album, Violet, on the same label, confirming all the good things we thought about them! By allowing a number of musicians to join him on this new opus, Andy Baxter has shown a willingness to work with more accomplished collaborators.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the "Surf Rider" EP (originally released in 2015 on Lumière Noire), Dialect Recordings publishes a limited vinyl edition featuring an exclusive edit of "Lies" by Blackjoy.



For the occasion, Il Est Vilaine’s long time collaborator Apollo Thomas has designed a brand-new cover and created a mini comics included with the vinyl. A beautiful collector’s item to honor this classic!

Repress!

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.



Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.



Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytumcomosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”



But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.



The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.



“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.



Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.



Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’snew renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

Kali’s artistry has always felt otherworldly, ethereal, and elusive. ‘Sincerely,’ represents her most vulnerable and intimate work to date, offering an existential glimpse into the way she romanticizes life and her inner world. The album is a sanctuary, an escape from the chaos, a search for peace, and an act of catharsis. ‘Sincerely,’ is a collection of letters to the world, allowing her fans to witness her at her most exposed as she invites them into her emotional journey.

It’s been a mere two months since Gaz released his first EP after coming back from a debilitating addiction to Greggs sausage rolls. Despite this long road of recovery, he has kept himself out of trouble and returned to furnish us with four more slabs of Steak Baked Garage Bakes!
Gary Loves Garage is a track of such pure Garage that if you knew how to take a m7/9 chord and pitch it about a bit you would be in the same ballpark. A lot of the Deep Garage Dads from his area Whatsapp Gary and on occasion, sit outside his house desperate for the library of m7/9 pad samples which Gaz has lovingly built up over many years on multiple Zip Disks. Of course, Gary would never share these m7/9’s as they form the backbone of his productions and if they got into the wrong hands there would be implications.

Gary gets a rare trip to NYC on Gary Visits NYC (BA Premium Economy). As the name suggests, Gaz splashed out on a British Airways Premium Economy ticket from Heathrow Terminal 5C but unfortunately Gaz got hammered in the Wetherspoons and didn’t realise that a 5C departure meant you had to get on the underground rail connection. He missed his flight.

Gary’s SP1200 - still a bone of contention for Gary with the lack of funds in his current life meaning an SP1200 is way out of reach. He has multiple ex-wives and various children which prove a drain on the monthly finances.

Finally -Gary’s Pad Patterns could be a paean to the aforementioned Zip disc, one of Gaz’s favourites! Zip disc 4 of 8. This has his best m7/9 chord samples on it and actually has not left the Zip reader since 1999 - apart from that one time when Gaz had to change the SCSI cable.

Black Josh continues to carve out his own lane with YSL Bootleg, a project that encapsulates his unique presence in underground rap while setting its sights far beyond any imposed labels. This is a release built on the foundations of collaboration and a genuine community of music makers—his years spent with Levelz, the legendary Manchester-based collective that blurred the lines between rap, grime, and rave culture, shaping a generation of artists, and Cult of The Damned, a crew of rappers who raised him, cultivating an audience that has seen him regularly pack venues and tour the UK, AUS and NZ.

The project captures Josh’s signature blend of sharp wit, undeniable Mancunian cadence, and layered references that land harder for those from the North West. It’s the next step for an independent artist who has never signed a record deal yet has amassed millions of streams across tracks like Paul Scholes, Own Ting (featuring Eliza and Jesse James Solomon), and the Skepta-produced, Cigaweed.

This is the first full-length project Josh has released since supporting Danny Brown on tour, an opportunity that saw him sharpen his already unruly stage presence under the mentorship of one of rap’s most unpredictable voices. Their pairing made perfect sense—two outspoken, off-kilter artists with a mutual disregard for convention. That energy is embedded in YSL Bootleg.

The project includes Council Pop featuring Sly Moon, a track that has been doing the rounds since its release last year. A lead single, Aw, Here it Goes, drops Friday February 28th ahead of the full release.

Garfield (track 8), incorporates a genuine jazz breakdown—an unexpected but fitting evolution from the days of sweaty, beer-stained basement shows that were a rite of passage for a young Black Josh. The production across the tape reflects Josh’s versatility, with tracks produced by Blah mastermind Lee Scott and longtime collaborator Sumgii.

With YSL Bootleg, Black Josh once again proves that his music is on his own terms—crafted with his peers, rooted in Manchester but designed to travel far beyond.