These Fresh Faves were picked by our readers over the weekend – and reviewed by Fresh On The Net’s POPPY BRISTOW this week. You can hear all these tracks in a single Soundcloud playlist here.

ANGEL B VALENTINE – Parasite

Spring is starting to give way to summer, the bracken is thick and verdant, and we’re all set to fret about mosquitoes and ticks. But this Parasite is a very different beast, getting this week’s Fresh Faves off to the shimmering start that this approaching season deserves. As a sprightly clack of percussion ushers in a swirling, sunlit eddy of synth and guitar, there’s nothing the least bit draining about this song.

Parasite is the debut single from Manchester’s Angel B Valentine, who according to their website are an ‘alternative pop/rock duo’ priding themselves on ‘their eclectic range of influences ranging from Pop and Indie to Shoegaze and Punk’. Backing up that claim in self-assured style, it’s a striking fanfare for what will surely be a long and exciting career.

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CAITLIN LM – When I Close My Eyes

If that’s left you hungry for some more dreamily absorbing slow-burn pop surprises, you’re in luck. Mancunian electronic musician Caitlin LM has offered up a stunning, but very different, example of the genre in When I Close My Eyes.

The song begins like any other moody piano number, but just as you think it’ll be content to sit in its niche it unspools gorgeously into a mesmerising soundscape of glitchy, flickering vocals and rich velvety strings. As the song slides from sorrowful balladry to chilled-out club bliss with incredible subtlety and sophistication, you’ll likely be left wishing more singer-songwriters had the imagination to pull off such elegant genre shifts.

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COTTONS – Second Hand Living Room

Manchester seems to be on top musical form lately. Is it down to FA Cup success, or the unusually low mineral content of the water? Probably neither, but with Second Hand Living Room, we’ve got a guitar-led pop-rock gem courtesy of the city’s own Cottons – or, as Spotify identifies them, ‘Jasper, Charlie, Ricky, [and] Jack’.

With its combination of full-blooded, rough-edged rhythm guitar and shiny polished synths, Second Hand Living Room is as carefree as they come. The lyrics and vocals brim with an easy, down-to-earth sense of fun (‘Dressing gown, dressing down / Baggy shirt, messing round’). With festival season on its way, you can imagine this getting belted out in fields up and down the land.

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LINES OF SILENCE – The Long Way Home (Amaury Cambuzat’s La Route Des Chou Edit)

Our next offering sparkles just as brightly, with North West kosmische outfit Lines of Silence enlisting Amaury Cambuzat from underground French favourites Ulan Bator to remix their track The Long Way Home. Together, they’ve whipped up a glittering stream of electronic sound over a driving motorik thrum.

Bandleader David Little says of the track, ‘Sometimes it takes a long time to get home, literally or figuratively. The Long Way Home is a celebration of the twists and turns of that journey, the wrong turns and false starts as well as the joy in reaching the destination’. Thanks to its Autobahn-like sense of adventure, The Long Way Home could hardly be a better realisation of that thesis.

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LO-FI JONES – My Love

Machynlleth indie-folk gang Lo-Fi Jones are having a good time of it at the moment. Their Soundcloud lists a wealth of achievements from 2023 alone, be it ‘winning battle of the folk bands at the National Esiteddfod’ or ‘competing in the final of Wales’s annual Welsh language song competition, Cân i Cymru’.

It’s fitting that new release My Love should be such a jolly little number. The positivity of this week’s Fresh Faves shows no sign of flagging, and between its perky ukulele and warmly warbling synth, it’s a pocket of happiness as comfortably unproduced as the band name suggests. Wherever Lo-Fi Jones go next, they’re bound to be welcomed with open arms and a huge silly grin.

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MY BEST UNBEATEN BROTHER – Time On Our Hands, Spider-Man

Should you have doubts that there’s life in guitar music yet, here come My Best Unbeaten Brother with the brisk, angular Time On Our Hands, Spider-Man. The lyrics may self-deprecatingly mention ‘landfill indie’ but this is far more vital than the usual identikit post-Britpop trudge. 

Lead vocalist Ben Parker cuts his sardonic wit with a tremulous emotional catch sure to put any Wedding Present fans in mind of David Gedge. The song comes from upcoming album Pessimist Pizza, which is ‘inspired by getting older, getting sadder, getting angrier with a post-Brexit world where The Smiths have been ruined by the actions of the ex-singer’.

Other tracks deal with ‘trying to understand The Fall; trying to understand life and death, and trying to understand records by The Steve Miller Band’. What’s not to love?

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MYLITTLEBROTHER – You Know Better

The fountain of bouncy, cheerful guitar indie is flowing in abundance this week, as we stay in a fraternal mood for now with Cumbria’s mylittlebrother. The boundlessly catchy You Know Better powers along at pace, letting tuneful flurries of melody burst through the backing. There’s nothing but energy here.

It’s a joyfully appropriate soundtrack should you want to go for a run, leap around your room, or just sing your heart out. They’re due to play a short run of gigs around the North of England over the last few days in May, and on the strength of this song, you could do a lot worse than catch them while you can.

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OCCASIONALLY HUMANS – Sheet Ghost

If you’re in the mood for something a little calmer after all that peppiness, then Los Angeles combo Occasionally Humans are here with Sheet Ghost, a song ready to soothe any jangled nerves you may harbour. As the sweetly hazy guitar and bass drift along, tethered only by a gentle shuffle of drums, Elisabeth ‘Liza’ Duffy’s understated, graceful vocal expertly cradles the song’s sweeping lullaby of a tune.

Although the lyrics’ central metaphor is charged with plaintive, poetically realised sadness, every note of the melody falls where you feel it should, and it’s as comforting as a dive onto a king-sized feather bed. It all adds up to a compellingly beautiful bit of dream pop which feels as though it’s spent years waiting for someone to write it.

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STELLA AND THE DREAMING – A Short Ballad For Frankie And Everything We Shared (in E Flat)

Time to get even more reflective. The name may suggest otherwise, but Waterford’s Stella and the Dreaming is a solo act, making music ‘from behind a garage door somewhere, stuffed with duvets and carpet covered frames’. This simultaneously cosy and enigmatic self-description suggests an intimacy which carries through strongly into Stella’s music.

A Short Ballad For Frankie And Everything We Shared (in E Flat) is a delicately spare piano piece, sung in a whisper as personal as the title would indicate. There’s only piano and Stella’s feather-light voice here, but the production is so dextrously done that (with the aid of a little multitracking) the sound takes on an enveloping lushness too. Stella by name, stellar by nature.

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THE BOOKSHOP BAND – Sanctuary

Here’s a real treat to round off this week’s Faves. Beth Porter and Ben Please are The Bookshop Band, who ‘write songs inspired by books and play them in bookshops’.

Ripe with folk instrumentation and beautifully sweet harmonies, Sanctuary is a beguiling ode to the scientific method as a mechanism of liberation. It was inspired by the novel La Belle Sauvage by the brilliant Philip Pullman and first released for its launch back in 2017, when they performed the song in front of the author himself.

Seven years later and Sanctuary has been set as the opening track of Emerge, Return, which when it comes out next month will be their first widely released album. If this song has you itching for the next page, why not get on down to the links below?

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PS from Del:

Thanks to everyone who submitted tracks last week. You’re more than welcome to submit a track for my show The Songbird Sessions on Islington Radio. It is a two hour show that goes out on Sundays, drop me an audio file and a bio here