BY STUART GLOSSOP
With festival season gearing up venues tend to slow down! Not so The Brudenell, where all the following takes place this month.
Since 1991, the Slackers have released fifteen albums and countless singles, while their 1000s of live performances feed their fans with energetic sets of ecstatic music. The Slackers have been called ‘the Sound of New York’ by the New York Times. They were described by Brooklyn Vegan as a “clean mix of Ska, Reggae, and Soul that gets dirtied up by Vic Ruggiero’s tough New York accent.’ In April 2022, The Slackers released a new album, “Don’t Let The Sunlight Fool Ya” (Pirates Press) which quickly shot to the top of the US Billboard charts. The first time that a Slackers’ album has charted! Ironically after 30 years as a band, they qualified as a Billboard ‘new artist!’ The Washington Post noted that the Slackers “remain at the top of their game.” The chart-topping sales of “Don’t Let The Sunlight Fool Ya” capped a 2-year comeback of the Slackers. When Covid stopped live shows in 2020, the Slackers pivoted to livestreams and made five full band concerts that were broadcast internationally to an audience of thousands. After the streams, they stayed in the studio and recorded the tunes that became ‘Don’t Let the Sunlight Fool Ya.’ The Slackers capped this comeback with a series of frenetic tours in 2022 and 2023. They played everything from clubs to festivals in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Brazil. Friday 13th June 2025
The feeling that Anastasia Coope’s music transmits seems to emanate from a precipice beyond the material world, like a void or memory pressing up against the veil. It is exacting and enveloping, but unmoored in space and time: ghostly, spectral, far-out folk. Darning Woman, her debut album, feels like a dispatch from another past. Akin to lullabies or nursery rhymes, its minimal folk instrumentation contorts into something staccato and strange led by Coope’s expressive, stratified vocals. In spite of the suggestion of antiquity that runs through Darning Woman, 21-year-old, Brooklyn-based Coope is very much a contemporary artist. Tuesday 17th June 2025
Basia Bulat is a singer-songwriter living in Montreal, Canada. She offers both a distinctive voice and artistry that pulls as much from gospel and soul as it does from classic folk. In addition to her skills as a powerhouse vocalist, Bulat is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, recording and performing on electric guitar, piano, autoharp, ukulele, bass, and charango. Her new album Basia’s Palace, mixed by Tucker Martine (Beth Orton, Neko Case, The National), and with string arrangements by Grammy-nominated composer Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa, Metric, Alvvays). Friday 20th June 2025
Sophie B. Hawkins burst onto the international music scene with her 1992 platinum-selling debut album, Tongues and Tails, which included the indelible hit song Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover and earned her a Best New Artist Grammy nomination.
The last three decades have brought multiple awards, sold out concerts, appearances on film and television, performances with some of the best known names in the business, a documentary feature, a critically-lauded tour-de-force performance as Janis Joplin in the nationally-touring play Room 105, songs appearing in hit films and TV shows, and five more albums, including Whaler, which featured the record-breaking longest-running single in Billboard Adult Contemporary chart history, the Number One hit, As I Lay Me Down. Much more than just a singer, Sophie writes all her own songs, is a multi-instrumentalist, and has been fully involved in every aspect of the production of her records herself, from background vocals and playing her own instruments, to engineering and production of her albums. She has proved an enduring artist with a fierce commitment to artistic integrity while both constantly evolving, and remaining steadfastly true to her own authentic history and experience which connects her to her fans at the very deepest levels Tuesday 1st July 2025
Describing Arab Strap’s music now almost seems like a pointless exercise: everyone’s familiar with their brand of storytelling and the singular musical vision that backed it up, but that’s exactly the point: Arab Strap blazed a trail for the kind of honest, colloquial songwriting that has become so common nowadays. Thursday 3rd July 2025
