New columns are always tricky to navigate at the start, but with four Out of Step features now in the can, it feels like it’s starting to shape its own identity.
While the first two leaned heavily towards guitar-based releases, since then the scales have tipped to provide a nice balance with releases that would ordinarily occupy the likes of our Albums Quarterly and Weirdo Rippers features. Styles aside, and the trend that has unfolded is the number of EPs being self-released.
It confirms something I’ve always thought about in the current new music landscape: the EP is fast becoming the sweet spot for many DIY artists. While perhaps the younger generation don’t maintain the patience of the one before them when listening to full-length releases, the key reason why so many younger DIY artists are leaning on the EP is simply down to affordability.
Granted, you can record in a myriad of ways that doesn’t include the studio these days, but for many people it remains the broad church of the ‘recording experience’. With costs escalating to unimaginable proportions, a lot of artists (both younger and older) simply can’t afford the time it takes to cut an LP. The next best thing? The EP, of course.
This fourth edition of Out of Step will be our last for 2025, with our Top 25 releases of the year set for publication in December. Will some of the below releases also feature then? Only time will tell…
Nyxy Nyx Interview: “Most of my songs are recorded the day I write them”
Aunt Zazà: Auntopia
Patar
The latest Out Of Step begins in Barcelona with Aunt Zazà’s beguiling trip, Auntopia.
Billed as “Five tracks, five names, five voices telling their stories”, there’s an elusive, ritualistic thread that runs through the patchwork of Auntopia. A mélange of breakbeats and droning electronic echoes seemingly conceived in the bowels of a cave.
There’s an exotic feeling with these recordings. The narrator, well-travelled, as Aunt Zazà teleports us to places of the past all across the world, but sonically, it’s presented as if she sees the future. It’s these odd juxtapositions that make Auntopia an adventure that is assuredly unmoored.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
Emho: Waves, Pines & Stones
Sonic Dialogue
In his own way, on his latest release, Waves, Pines & Stones, Emho tells a story through sound.
The French multidisciplinary artist pulls from different corners of the experimental sound world to present a mash-up of ideas. Tape loops, drones, and environmental-based field recordings resulting in raw, grainy textures of sound that are a beautiful backdrop to a wintry Sunday morning amid iron-grey skies.
What Emho produces on Waves, Pines & Stones isn’t sullen, though. There’s an aloofness where retreating into a quiet corner will see you finding the best results, and underneath the surface, there’s something quite beautiful.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
Fulton Lights: Well the Night Has Come
Self-released
Fulton Lights is the brainchild Andrew Spencer Goldman who resumes the project with Well the Night Has Come – the first release since the debut 2018 LP, Moonwalking into the Future
Featuring a number of collaborators including TJ Lipple (Aloha), Jean Cook (Ida, Waco Brothers, Mekons, Beauty Pill), and Adam Ollendorff (Will Hoge, Kacey Musgraves, Lera Lynn), Well the Night Has Come is the kind of nimble alt-country that works well alongside Jeff Tweedy’s new triple LP, Twilight Override.
Nothing fancy or flamboyant, just good songcraft with subtle inflections of strings, acoustics brushes and cymbal washes that makes Well the Night Has Come the kind of release that brings a smile to your face. Less really is more.
Out November 7. Pre-order from Bandcamp
Laura Loriga: Moon Talk
God Unknown Records
London-based songwriter, Laura Loriga, returns with the Moon Talk EP – her first new music since the 2022 LP, Verve.
With two of the three songs stripped back versions of ones set to feature on Loriga’s forthcoming 2026 release, Almas, it sees Loriga exploring darker frontiers than ever before. Backed by a host of guests, including Euan Hinshelwood, Stefano Michelotti, and David John Morris, there’s a ghostly essence that drifts in and out of these songs.
It’s folk music for cathedrals, pulling from the same corners as Marissa Nadler, and if the likes of Kali Malone ever tried her hand at the more conventional aspects of songcraft, then it would probably sound like something Lorgia has produced with Moon Talk; a lovely taster for what’s to come.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
Mila Cloud: Quietly Unpresent
Self-released
After a quiet 2024, Warsaw’s Mila Cloud returns with more aural splendour in the way of Quietly Unpresent.
Following her 2023 EP, Long Way Back from the Familiar Place We’ve Never Been To (the inaugural winner of Sun 13’s EPs of the year), Quietly Unpresent remains firmly entrenched in the enclave Mila Cloud has created within the world of drone and shoegaze. These compositions, glittering like jewels from the crown, with heart-felt passages that lead to eye-watering drones.
The whole thing hits with brute force, and at this point the guitarist can simply do no wrong. Quietly Unpresent, another beautiful chapter in a story that continues to be one of the most understated within the European underground.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
Millpool: One Last Midnight
XVI Records
Consisting of Joshua Byrne (vocals, guitar), Duncan Little (bass), Ammar Kalia (drums), and Alejandro Van-Zandt Escobar (tenor saxophone), Millpool aren’t your average post-rock-by-numbers concern.
On their debut EP, One Last Midnight, the four-piece channel something likened to June of 44 and Ian Macakye on a crash course, and the results are very fine indeed. Recorded by Misha Hering (High Vis, Virginia Wing et al), Millpool cherry-pick the best parts of anyone’s record collection and produce the kind of noise that brims with confidence.
From all the post-rock-inspired bands coming out of London, Millpool are arguably the pick of the bunch, and there’s little doubt that One Last Midnight is a springboard for a future that people are about to hear more of.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
No Peeling: No Peeling
Feel It Records
Nottingham’s No Peeling don’t mess about. No airs or graces whatsoever, Dan, Sophie, Dom, Nick and Phil (yup, withheld surnames intentional) arrive with synth strangling, cerebral egg punk that’s over before you know it.
Clocking in at a tick over eight minutes, No Peeling is boiled down to to the bare bones. Resuci Annie cuts all the way through to the marrow, while Hi Vis looks at the humorous side of the working-class life, and remaining in that orbit, Swift Half is an accurate snapshot of pub dweller’s evening gone wrong.
Equal parts gritty and playful, the worst thing about No Peeling is that there’s not more of it. Hopefully that’ll change in the not-too-distant future.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
Null Assembly: Hinterland
Self-released
Remaining in the north, and this one dropped earlier this year from Leeds producer, George Miller, who operates under the Null Assembly moniker.
Hinterland is a fierce collision between the drone and hip-hop. Abrasive walls of sound that capture the kind of field recordings that Poppy H has been the leading lights of over the last couple of years, there’s a civic vitality that operates underneath the mix here.
Effectively, Hinterland is a product born out of solitude, and the freedom to roam and capture life on the run. In that respect, it’s not unlike the inspirations that led to Burial’s earliest works, and it will be interesting to see where Miller goes to next.
Listen / Purchase from Bandcamp
The Orchestra (For Now): Plan 76
Self-released
For those who found a bridge with Ex Agent’s excellent New Assumptions… EP that featured in our third edition of Out of Step, London’s The Orchestra (For Now) occupies similar territory on their second EP, Plan 76.
Although a bit more forceful than their Bristol adversaries, The Orchestra (For Now) (all seven of them!) echo their fellow London dwellers, Black Country, New Road with a dash of Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead thrown into the mix.
It’s a heady brew that’s destined to reach more ears (they’ve already played Green Man and End of the Road), and having also sold out their recent Rough Trade exclusive show in under a day, well, the ascent on the back of Plan 76 will be sharp. – Hayley Burton
Released October 31. Pre-order from Bandcamp
Wilks: A Soul to Borrow
Bricolage
Following last year’s Left Hand Drive EP, Nick Wilkinson returns with the equally excellent A Soul to Borrow.
In fact, his second EP hits and pops harder; from the first note of Take It In, your senses are rattled as the producer grabs you by the scruff of the neck and hurls you out onto the dance floor with the kind of IDM that’s presented through the lens of early dubstep (led by the excellent Ameliorate).
Sometimes words don’t do things justice, and Wilks’ A Soul to Borrow is one of those moments. Like majority under the Bricolage stable, just press play and be teleported into a world where all your troubles are vapourised.
Released October 31. Pre-order from Bandcamp
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