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.

ANDREW HARTSHORN – I Can Hear You

This week, courtesy of composer, artist, and Monochrome Motif Records label head Andrew Hartshorn, our Fresh Faves open with the sparse, soothing murmur of I Can Hear You. A soft, delicate melody is picked out on piano until cello, oboe, and other strings slowly join in, building up a rich, touching, and undeniably beautiful world of sound in only four minutes.

I Can Hear You is the first single from Andrew’s new album Sketches For The Requiem, a suite of pieces he composed as a means to process the unspeakable loss of his son. This piece works through a reservoir of deep and difficult emotions, but as great classical music so often does, it communicates them with elegant and profoundly affecting clarity.

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BEN CHANGO – Scream (Radio Edit)

With the solstice just gone, the days will be heating up as surely as they begin to draw in, and brand-new band Ben Chango have kicked us over the line of summer with Scream. It’s an exhilarating indie-rock volley of chiming catchy guitar, bouncing bass, and vocals which sit in that sun-soaked sweet spot between angst and innocence before breaking into a cathartic yell at the chorus.

Scream distils youth’s turbulent thrills into an easy, effortless shot of energy, just as the Undertones and Supergrass have done before them – the perfect tune for June. Not only is it a terrific fanfare for the upcoming warmer weeks, it’s a very promising and impressive start to what should be a long and happy career.

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FLAKEBELLY – Lazy Afternoon

If you’d rather spend your summer days kicking about in Itchycoo Park or Strawberry Fields, psychedelic Stornoway songsmith Flakebelly is back on the Faves with another mind-bending tune in the form of Lazy Afternoon. But despite his self-description as a ‘purveyor of pomes and posey’, Lazy Afternoon will come as a shock to anyone expecting your standard hippie whimsy.

Hitting the ground running with a biting, chugging bassline, angular shards of gothic guitar slice over the top while flakebelly’s voice carries the ardency of someone sharing an agonising secret. It’s a brainy, spacious, absolutely compelling song which has more in common with Television or Wire than Sgt. Pepper’s. You can’t help but wonder what he’ll get up to next.

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GIANT PARTY – Sloppy Cleopatra

London’s Giant Party take a more relaxed tack, as slinky neo-soul/reggae/indie fusion Sloppy Cleopatra bobs along with a sly, tiptoeing strut. Even so, our lead singer yelps ‘I wanna know what life means’ as if you alone have the power to reveal it to him.

But more pertinently, the lyrics ooze and crawl with uneasy, fetid imagery, undercutting the music’s tastiness like the ‘maggot in the food’ the frontman compares himself to. ‘Gnawing at your stomach like you drank the dirty water’, he murmurs, just as the melody gnaws at your ears. By taking lines that wouldn’t be out of place in Magazine’s ‘A Song from Under the Floorboards’ and setting them against such a cool, cheery groove, Sloppy Cleopatra is a rare treat for bilious insectoid goths and self-assured smooth movers alike.

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LOU TERRY – Canyon

From supporting experimental music heroes Black Country, New Road to earning praise from John Cooper Clarke and Steve Lamacq, South London’s Lou Terry has been doing well for himself. Here we find Lou staking his claim to success with the irresistibly catchy Canyon.

Strolling into being with a jaunty guitar and a quavering synth over an electronic drum march, there’s a purposeful sense of adventure built into Canyon’s bones. The production is refreshingly clean and spare, giving Lou’s clear tones plenty of room. But it really kicks into gear when a fuzzy, scuzzy glam rock rhythm pulses through like a rush of reanimating electricity. It’s an exciting new offering from a singer-songwriter who is, as the lyrics suggest, already ‘building a case for [himself]’.

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MARSUPIAL SOUP – In The Vines

The delightfully named Marsupial Soup are Fresh Faves regulars for good reason. Every song they come out with is a little pocket of easy-going, good-natured new-wavey fun that hooks itself remorselessly into your brain, and In The Vines is no exception. As bouncy as a kangaroo and smooth and warming as a good cream of tomato, the song lives up to that puckish band name in style.

According to their bio, ‘Marsupial Soup may contain flavours of sunlit, tropical indie with Latin rhythms and oddball post-punk leanings’. They describe In The Vines as ‘a track for the summer of the nostalgic past, one for that holiday romance that lives with you in the rosy vista of yesteryear’ but it’s every bit as fresh a Fave as you can ask for.

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MURIDAE – Caramel

Something a little softer next, from new Manchester electropop trio Muridae. Their scampering folktronica number Caramel is a thing of small beauty, with Chloe Barnes’ intimate vocals glowing with emotion despite her clipped delivery. The backdrop pulls from a pastel paintbox of instruments across the sonic rainbow, from electronic to acoustic, to lend colour to its elegant setting. All the same, this remarkably delicate and impressively original piece of work doesn’t feel the least bit cluttered. Lovely stuff.

Muridae are due to release their first single, Transcendent, on the 1st July. We may only have to wait a week to hear more from them, but on the strength of this it can’t come too soon.

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NEWBORN – Soft Blue

If one charming and unique piece of electronica isn’t enough, then here’s another, courtesy of the enigmatic Newborn. Soft Blue begins with a choir of soft electronic chirruping, as if the mice from Bagpuss have been run through a sampler, then gives itself over to synth washes and a skittering, jazzy drumbeat before it all joins together with more bleeps and hiccups to make a loveable, peculiar little gem of a tune.

It’s all wonderfully suggestive of a natural field recording taken on another planet and set to a beat. There’s not much to be found about Newborn online, but Soft Blue is the first track on their album Sisters Stick Together, which is out now.

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THE EXHALES – Kick The Chair

Should you be craving something with a little more crunch, here are Glasgow band The Exhales to bring us Kick The Chair, a proud, dignified indie-rock roar which is bound to rouse your spirits. It may be free of E-bowed guitars or folk melodies, but the song draws from a long heritage of Scottish rock music and refines it to a distinctively contemporary point.

Although a sense of soaring joy is baked into those rushing guitars, the lyrics are a sensitive but potently unflinching look at the male mental health crisis. It’s fitting, then, that it should leave you with such steadfast hope. Kick The Chair has seen enthusiastic reviews from the likes of Existential Magazine and It’s All Indie, and their pile of plaudits is bound to only get bigger.

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THE ILFORDS – Snake Groove

Recent regulars The Ilfords bring this week’s Fresh Faves to an invigorating conclusion with Snake Groove, a sleekly produced but energetically unbridled rocker which fizzes like a shaken can of pop. According to the band, Snake Groove ‘depicts a soldier in foreign lands, trying to find his way while battling the hyenas that plague his thoughts’. Its muscular riffs, apparently inspired by Queens of the Stone Age, provide the force to back this up.

Since I last reviewed them for Fresh on the Net back in November, in the space of a few months The Ilfords have already come a long way. As their future grows brighter and brighter, it’ll be a thrill to see where this irrepressible and infectious gang choose to go next.

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PS from TR: If you’ve submitted a track that hasn’t been picked for the Listening Post, our team has definitely listened to it and there’s no need to send it again: feel free to send us an even stronger track another week. The same goes if you were picked for the Listening Post but didn’t feature in our Fresh Faves.

But if we’ve recently featured you in our Fresh Faves please wait three months before sending us another track, so we have space to help other deserving artists… For more info see Robinson Has A Good Old Moan.