This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors, Neil G, Benny Thomas, and Irfan Ayaan.
Between The Cracks is where we gather the releases that slip past the obvious. Six leftfield gems, that deserve your time and attention. This week brings Laurence Pike’s rhythmic architecture meeting open‑ended improvisation, while (Ahmed) channel their spiritual free‑jazz fire into the music of Thelonious Monk. Irreversible Entanglements return with an album that feels urgent and unbound, and we bring you a wonderfully odd, intimate, and quietly surreal collaboration from Anadol & Marie Klock – plus new heat from BCUC and Alabaster DePlume. As always, enjoy the music and support the artists and labels who keep the world interesting. Check out our latest picks below.
Albums
Anadol & Marie Klock – Manivelles
Manivelles is delightfully strange in a very specific way. Anadol and Marie Klock build songs that feel like sideways French pop. They fold in krautrock repetition, minimal synth pulse, and hazy psychedelic folk colours. Klock’s voice often slips between spoken lines and soft melodies. It sounds like she is reading from a diary left out in the sun. Underneath, Anadol favours small, looping figures. Organs, warped strings, and vintage electronics revolve around simple motifs and gradually twist into new shapes. Some tracks have the charm of a misremembered radio hit. Others drift toward sound collage and use rhythm more as a suggestion than a rule. The title Manivelles suggests cranks and mechanisms. That fits. The album feels like a hand-built machine that does not behave exactly as expected. It is eccentric and intimate, rewarding listeners who enjoy pop music pleasantly bent out of shape. – IA
BCUC – The road is never easy
On the road is never easy, BCUC condense more than two decades of Soweto street wisdom into ten compact songs. This is their fifth album and their first for Outhere Records. The band’s Afro-psychedelic sound is still intact. Indigenous funk, ritual chants, and rock urgency all collide in arrangements that feel like ceremonies more than simple tracks. The opener lifts the mood with Higher vibes and sets a tone of rugged optimism. From there, the record moves between rallying cries and meditative passages. The lyrics dwell on unfulfilled promises after apartheid, the weight of daily survival, and the stubborn persistence of hope. Choruses arrive slowly and often grow out of long, chant-like builds. You can hear how these songs were forged onstage, with sections that feel ready to stretch far beyond the recorded versions. By the time the final piece affirms Matla a rona ke bophelo, the journey feels earned. The album reads as a spiritual road trip through Soweto today, intense but ultimately healing. – IA
أحمد [Ahmed] – Play Monk
After 6 albums re-imagining the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] now turns to the material of Malik’s bandmate Thelonious Monk in the group’s ongoing search for future music. If you know this quartet, it won’t surprise you that Play Monk is not one of those “respectful Monk tribute” records where everybody plays the tunes nicely and calls it a day. أحمد [Ahmed] takes Monk’s pieces and kind of pulls them apart in public. You can still feel the bones of the songs in there, ‘Bye-Ya / Epistrophy‘, ‘Friday Thirteenth‘, ‘Round Midnight‘, all that, but the band treats them more like starting points than sacred objects. Pat Thomas lights up the keys, circling around these stubborn little piano figures, Seymour Wright‘s alto sax comes in all chopped-up and wiry, and double bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal keep shoving the whole thing forward until it starts to feel less like a tune and more like some intense group spell. What I like about it is that it’s really not polite. It’s repetitive, tense, and sometimes a little mean, and that’s exactly why it works. Their version of ‘Round Midnight’ sounds like they kept four notes from the original and then wandered off into completely different territory for 25 minutes, and it works. ‘Friday Thirteenth’ has my head spinning; they lock into a phrase until it stops being catchy and turns hypnotic instead. It’s sweaty, percussive, kind of obsessive music. Not easygoing at all, but if you like jazz that feels alive and slightly unhinged, this thing is great. – BT
Laurence Pike – Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet
On a second listen, Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet starts to make a different kind of sense. The whole “quintet” thing isn’t a thing, as Laurence Pike plays most of the instruments on the album. Ben Lerner (alto sax), Novak Manojlovic (piano) and Nico Callahan (synthesis) help out Pike on a few tracks. For the most part, you’re hearing how Pike builds the music on his own. It’s pretty much drums and machines, but the space between them fills in differently this time around. What felt a bit sparse or hard to grab onto at first now comes across as more deliberate. The rhythms don’t settle so much as circle each other, and there’s this constant sense of almost locking in, then slipping away again. It’s subtle, but there’s more going on than it lets on at first. The idea of “utopia” also lands a bit differently. It’s not big or grand; it’s quieter, more like a process Pike is working through in real time. He’s not showing off so much as testing how far he can stretch things, how human and machine can meet somewhere in the middle. The tracks that seem to sum the album up best are ‘The Shame of Jazz to Come’, ‘Night Bird’ and ‘Even Given’. They sit right at the centre of the record’s idea: rhythmic, exploratory, and a good snapshot of Pike’s drum-and-machines approach. Just press play and marvel at the brilliance of a master musician who continues to colour outside the lines. – CFS
Irreversible Entanglements – Future Present Past
Future Present Past threads time, struggle, and joy into one continuous current. Irreversible Entanglements, the free-jazz collective record again for Impulse!, bringing their explosive live energy into focused studio form. Juntos Vencemos, featuring Helado Negro, opens with a sense of communal uplift. His voice softens the edges of the band’s fire without dulling their intensity. Don’t Lose Your Head and Vibrate Higher, both featuring MOTHERBOARD, push into more electronic-tinged territory. Spoken word, horns, and rhythm lock into grooves that feel both street-level and cosmic. Panamanian Fight Song and The Messenger channel classic protest jazz. Drums and bass surge forward while Camae Ayewa’s voice cuts through like a siren. In the closing We Overcome, Helado Negro returns, and the band reframes the language of civil-rights anthems for the present moment. The album’s title is literal. These pieces live in dialogue with history, the current crisis, and a future that the band insist on imagining into being. – IA
EP’s
Alabaster DePlume – Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue
Music is about connection, or it should be, a quiet spark between people, places, memories, all tuned into the same frequency. Recorded at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, this EP was Alabaster DePlume‘s response to the connection among him, bassist Shahzad Ismaily, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. After performing music from his acclaimed album ‘A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole’ (released March 2025), the trio showcased their strong onstage connection. On an off day in Brooklyn, DePlume recorded this collection of instrumental pieces inspired by their performances and improvisations across the US. – NG
