This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Neil G, Imran Mirza and Irfan Ayaan.
Yet another Friday rolls around, bringing with it our latest edition of Between The Cracks, packed with seven must-hear releases. These are the albums we’ve been loving lately, and we think you’ll love them too! If you find a release you adore, consider tapping the buy link and snagging a copy. Or if you’re strapped for cash, share —share —share! Supporting artists and labels never goes out of style!
Albums
Nelson Devereaux Trio – Three Lights in the Dark
Hold on! Before you read any more reviews, make sure you don’t skip over this album. The debut from the Nelson Devereaux Trio is nothing short of a revelation, capturing lightning in a bottle across six spontaneously born pieces. The in-the-moment, warts-and-all approach is what I love about this album. Knowing these six works were captured in a single, improvised take without endless overdubs or studio trickery—it’s three master musicians responding to each other with telepathic communication. Nelson Devereaux, the Twin Cities renaissance man at the helm, is joined by Dave Power (known from his work with Bathtub Cig) and Cody McKinney, whose experience with Jake Baldwin and The Early Planets clearly informs his approach. The avant-garde nature of some tracks may challenge the ears of listeners expecting more traditional jazz structures. For me, it’s pure joy. SUNRISE VISION and H3LL YEAH are undeniable standout moments —exploratory, raw, and joyously dynamic. The ever-evolving and brilliant DISTANC3S is a personal highlight, displaying the breadth of the trio’s impressive chops and intriguing instrumentation, clocking in at 18 and 15 minutes. This isn’t elevator music or background listening—it demands attention and rewards careful listening. So, grab your favourite beverage, put on headphones, chill, take your time and enjoy the adventure. – NG
Alfa Mist – Roulette
Crafting a science fiction universe across fifteen tracks, Alfa Mist’s sixth album, Roulette, breaks out of the gates with a resounding presence. Imagining a universe that explores themes of reincarnation, among others, the album demonstrates the producer’s ability to conjure up a near-future world through his signature piano layers and a smooth, effortless jazz improvisation that comes together. Exploring revenge, forgiveness, and redemption, listeners are taken on an immersive psychedelic journey, characterised by its atmospheric quality. Notable tracks that effectively convey the album’s core message include ‘Between Lives’, ‘Dersen Cafe’ and ‘Give Anything’. This album confirms Mist as one of the most forward-thinking composers in UK music today, breaking down the borders between hip-hop, jazz, and philosophy. – NG
Peki Momés – Peki Momés
Mocambo Records has proved a bastion for contemporary funk & soul, and now, with the release of Turkish vocalist Peki Momés’ self-titled debut, the label can boast yet another modern-day gem amongst their treasure trove. Billed as running the gamut from psychedelia to Turkish disco, Momés delivers an outstanding debut that absolutely relishes within its engrossing soundscapes but is really catapulted to brilliance by Momés herself. A captivating presence in many ways, the vocalist playfully veers from enchanting to haunting, but is always the vehement focal point throughout the album. Peki Momés finds herself with some incredible support and further aided by a core line-up comprised of drummer Matthias Hetzer, percussionist Lukas Joachim and Braun himself credited for bass, keys, synth, percussion and guitar. Malik Diao rekindles his collaborative history with Braun as he tackles a variety of instrumentation throughout the album. Alongside the excellent ensemble of musicians who are all integral to the project’s sound, Momés soars amidst the album’s shifting musical landscape: the undeniable groove of ‘Göç Mevsimi’, the playful and innovative ‘Future’ or the twisted psychedelia of ‘Bahar’. The childhood photo for the album’s cover is indicative of the charm Momés eschews throughout the album’s twelve tracks as she comfortably weaves in between styles and moods, riding the wave of her debut project with surprising confidence and poise. From the hypnotic rhythms, textured instrumentation and the undeniable charisma of Peki Momés herself, this debut offering not only asserts Mocambo Records as leading curator for contemporary funk and soul, but also a record that celebrates heritage, introducing Momés as an artist with substance and style. – IM
My Jazzy Child – Extracøntinent
Damien Mingus returns under his My Jazzy Child alias with Extracøntinent. Far from being a purely imagined landscape, the record builds a tangible sonic territory shaped by Mingus’s 25 years of experimentation, where electronic improvisations, traditional influences, and pop exotica collide. It stands as the second chapter in a trilogy, following 2021’s Innéisme, and asserts insularity through its use of the Ø symbol, an island-continent made of sound. The track ‘Exoteric Patterns’ sets the tone with layered electronic motifs that shimmer like shifting cartographies. Its brief but dense structure unfolds like a ritual, pulling the listener into the album’s esoteric world. Meanwhile, ‘Lost in Laos’ takes a more atmospheric turn, balancing fragmented melodies with field-recording textures that evoke the disorientation of travel and the fragility of cultural memory. Across twelve concise yet evocative pieces, Extracøntinent operates as both collage and map, charting an archipelago of sound that resists easy categorisation. Mingus crafts a space where folklore, electronic abstraction, and improvisation converge into a restless but inviting whole. – WBS
Kelman Duran – Scorpio Falling
Kelman Duran’s Scorpio Falling, released via Scorpio Red, is a spectral journey that extends his practice of weaving memory, politics, and sound into drifting, meditative forms. Positioned as a continuation of 2021’s Night in Tijuana, the record orients itself toward movement, imagined for long motorbike rides, yet holds an intimacy in its layering of ambient, free jazz, and diasporic echoes. ‘1804’ opens the album with a haunting invocation, sampling Wadada Leo Smith to honour the Haitian Revolution. The piece feels both reverent and destabilising, its ghostly loops and fractured motifs acting like fragments of history resurfacing in the present. By contrast, ‘Equinox’, featuring Frankie, bends Coltrane’s writing into a cello-led meditation, where Duran’s production dissolves boundaries between jazz tradition and spectral ambience. The interplay of strings and electronics creates a fragile but commanding stillness. Across Scorpio Falling, Duran continues to collapse temporal and spatial borders, drawing lines between Black musical traditions and their global reverberations. It is an album that resists resolution, asking listeners not just to hear, but to drift and inhabit. – WBS
Omasta – Jazz Report from the Hood
The band’s name itself tells the story. “Omasta” – derived from a regional Krakow dialect word meaning “fat added to food for flavor” – serves as the perfect metaphor for their thick, heavy and deep sound. Bruno Sikorski’s keyboards provide the melodic backbone, while Antoni Blumhoff’s soprano sax and flute dance around Paweł Kowalik’s trumpet lines. The rhythm section, comprising bassist Wojciech Roman and drummer Nikodem Wikieł, doesn’t just hold down the fort – they construct it brick by brick. Jazz Report from the Hood exists in the liminal space between genres, drawing inspiration from J Dilla, Madlib, Roy Ayers, and Donald Byrd, while maintaining the live instrumental energy that only a tight quintet can provide. Track titles like ‘Dead End’, ‘Ankle Breaker’ and ‘Kazimierz’ (a reference to Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter) paint a sonic map of the city that gave birth to this sound. For a debut album, it’s remarkably assured, suggesting that these five musicians have found their collective voice. If this is Omasta’s opening statement, the conversation they’re about to start promises to be fascinating. – IA
Marie de la Nuit – Transportées
French sound artist Marie Guérin (aka Marie de la Nuit) released Transportées via Valentina Magaletti and Fanny Chiarello’s Permanent Draft label earlier this year. Finding another artist who sounds quite like Marie de la Nuit is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and this album is the ideal proof of why that’s the case. Since 2001, she has been manipulating field recordings, radio archives, and traces left on the airwaves by “hertzian ghosts”. In this project, she explores the parallels between Breton and Tunisian musical culture, none more evident than on the two standout tracks ‘Mon Fantom’ and ‘BZH’. This one took a while to reach us, but now that it has, we’re all ears. – CFS
