This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors: Words By Shoaib, Neil G, Benny Thomas, and Irfan Ayaan.
Another Friday rolls around, bringing a fresh edition of Between The Cracks packed with releases from across the spectrum. We’ve loved these albums lately and think you will too! New and notable albums from Louis Matute, Bow and Arrow, Jeremy Cunningham, Plum and more. If you find a release you adore, consider snagging a copy. Supporting artists and labels never goes out of style!
Albums
Louis Matute – The World is Stable Now
The World is Stable Now is an understated work of dreamy, gently swirling homespun ambient dream jazz and hypnagogic pop, rich with warmth, fuzzy tape texture, and infectious melodies. Métropole de Pierre Grise opens the record with Louis Matute‘s guitar behaving like a lead character wandering through a film whose script it doesn’t yet know, with Moog and Mellotron haze gathering around it. The title track The World is Stable Now carries an ironic title, since nothing here feels quite stable; melodies drift like late-night conversations and refuse to settle. Outre-Mer and Musique d’Avenir keep that fragile, obvious quality, with shadows of film music, deserted roads, and motel lights in fog. Forêt de Tuyaux, This Place Will Bloom, and Encyclopédie du Drame let small melodies arrive like natural phenomena, while Le Ponant opens the sound out with tenor saxophone and trumpet. Adieu, Monde Cruel and closer Les Musiciens se Cachent Parmi les Tombes complete the record’s quiet idea, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: a world where jazz, film music, song, and experiment coexist without having to justify themselves. Lyric-wise, the album speaks through its titles rather than its words; each French title works like a small placard for an invisible city, and the melodies do the rest of the talking. – IA
Jeremy Cunningham – Passing Fires
Following the raw emotional weight of his 2020 breakthrough The Weather Up There, Chicago drummer and composer Jeremy Cunningham returns with Passing Fires. Dedicated to his late father, the album trades heavy sorrow for communal warmth, threading intimate domestic piano sketches, cassette tape hiss, and living-room family noise into a vital dialogue between Chicago and Los Angeles. On ‘To the Sky’, Cunningham locks with fellow drummer Makaya McCraven and guitarist Matt Gold over a breezy, sun-dappled bossa sway. Pure ease. Sen Morimoto’s wordless vocals float above the rhythm section like morning mist, lending effortless, weightless grace. ‘Some Days’ leans into melancholy bedroom soul. Jeff Parker‘s brittle guitar chords sit against Cunningham’s relaxed backbeat while Morimoto delivers conversational lines about grief and everyday survival. Nothing feels hurried. Every chord breathes with extraordinary tenderness. Shadows gather on ‘Beyond the Veil’. Here, Parker’s fractured guitar harmonics and Josh Johnson‘s expressive alto sax wade through eerie synth washes and rolling cymbals. Quiet unease. The ensemble drifts into psychedelic territory before finding a shared, hypnotic calm. Teaming up with members of Resavoir, ‘Windows’ opens up gorgeous ambient chamber territory. Will Miller‘s Rhodes chords and Johnson’s glowing horn phrases hover like dust motes in late-afternoon sunlight, while subtle tape hiss cushions Cunningham’s brushed snare. Utterly sincere. Passing Fires proves that shared grief doesn’t have to remain cold. By surrounding private memories with close friends, Cunningham delivers a luminous, deeply moving triumph. – WBS
Camila Nebbia’s The Hanged One – Limbo
Described by Jazz PT magazine as “an essential saxophonist of our time”. The prolific Camila Nebbia (this is her third album this year) presents Hanged One, a striking new set of compositions brought to life by a deeply responsive sextet. With Nebbia on tenor saxophone & compositions, and Julia Biłat (cello), Arne Braun (guitar), Andres Marino (electronics), Vinicius Cajado (double bass), and Lukas Akintaya (drums), they form a striking ensemble whose interplay gives the music its depth and drive. The ensemble navigates intricate structures and open spaces with equal sensitivity, shaping a sound that is both deliberate and fluid. The title track, along with ‘Alumbra‘, ‘Post metamorfosis’, and ‘Crece al río’, are the four standout songs and show how well they mix it up. As with the recent Heavy Handed collaborative album (see here), Nebbia is the gravitational pull of this record. Her incisive tenor voice remains at the centre, guiding the group through a series of tense, immersive, and quietly powerful pieces. – CFS
Civilistjävel! – Älvgång
Bristol/London imprint Six of Swords has released only a handful of records, yet each one feels significant, a label more concerned with substance than quantity. If you’ve somehow missed Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels by Mayssa Jallad or Boiling Wells (Demos ’19-’22) by Jabu (check out our Leftovers!), consider this your cue to put that right. Both are essential listening. And so, to the label’s latest work of wonder. Swedish producer Civilistjävel! or Tomas Bodén to his family and friends, makes music that feels both haunted and handmade. Recorded largely at Stockholm’s EMS Studios on vintage analogue gear, Älvgång blends brittle machine rhythms with eerie electronics, sparse pads, and devotional voices, alongside Swedish pastoral sounds, Georgian chants, gongs, and chimes. It’s a deeply personal record, dedicated to Bodén’s grandfather and named after Strinne and Bjärtrå, two names for the same family-connected patch of land. From the eerie atmosphere of ‘Strinne Ett‘ to Strinne Tre’s drifting, fog-like vocal incantations by Mariska Baars aka Soccer Committee, the skittering beats, heavy sub-bass, and tense modular FX of ‘Strinne Fyra‘ featuring Carrier and the sparse, haunting sounds of ‘Bjärtrå Två‘ featuring Jasmine Butt aka guest, the album keeps you in its murk. – BT
Plum – Bodies in Motion
Bodies in Motion finds the Chicago trio Plum turning post-punk into an exhilarating, full-body rush. Rough guitars, motorik drums, and interlocking rhythms keep the record twitching forward, as if standing still might cause everything to collapse. On their second album, the band — Jeff Kelley (guitar, lead vocals), Heather Perry (bass, vocals), and new drummer Eric Ridder — expands its vocabulary through layered counterpoint, interlocking rhythms, and parts that answer and circle one another. Asymmetric wraps around itself with wonderfully uneasy precision, while Too Much Sunlight captures burnout through a frantic, almost claustrophobic vibe. The title track pushes that physicality further, imagining movement as something hypnotic and inescapable. Across its eleven songs, Plum sounds restless, playful, and fiercely alive. It leaves you energised and slightly disoriented, like stepping outside after dancing too hard in a crowded room at midnight, with a good feeling resonating all over. – NG
Bow and Arrow – Bow and Arrow
Bow and Arrow is the debut record from the duo of Lea Bertucci and Michael Beharie, a work of spectral folk and electroacoustic plainchant that occupies a space both ancient and uncannily contemporary. Lux opens the record like a door left ajar, barely two minutes long. Gem stretches close to ten minutes, voices intertwining, dissolving into electronic distortion, and re-emerging in moments of harmony, with bells sounding throughout as gestures of anachronism and quiet resistance. Last Wish holds the same suspended feeling, while His Knees Are Rocks, Regina, and Coco move between medieval plainchant, electroacoustic improvisation, and spectral folk song. Single edits of Last Wish and Gem close the set. Bertucci calls the music devotional music for the age of alienation, and the lyrics behave accordingly: plainchant fragments surface and dissolve, words are felt more than followed, and the intimacy on offer feels imagined rather than declared. – IA
