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.

BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB – Hoem

t may be winter outside, but going by this groovy jazz-funk number, in David Fagin and Dan McLoughlin’s hearts it’s clearly spring. Though Fagin’s roots sit firmly within the punchy strictures of power pop, as Book of the Month Club, he and McLoughlin have a far broader mission statement: ‘that every song we release sound completely different than the one before it’.

But we’re dealing with no dilettantes here. Smooth and jagged in all the right places, Hoem boasts a never-crowded menagerie of instrumentation while slinking along with solid-gold confidence. Book of the Month Club don’t appear to have released any new music for a couple of years, but could their submission to the Fresh Faves suggest something on the horizon? Let’s hope so.

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CHINWE – Moon

What a delight to have a new offering from long-time friend of Fresh on the Net Chinwe, who has been brightening the Faves with her spare, magical work since 2020 and who graced the line-up of Fresh on the Net Live back in September. ‘Her harp playing is dreamlike,’ wrote Neil March in his excellent recap, ‘and, combined with her distinctive, dexterous and beautiful voice, I am whisked away into an ethereal world of peace and tranquility’.

Moon is a perfect showcase of her soothing sensibility, but this irresistible gentleness is matched by incredible musical sophistication and a stimulating knack for invention, the complex melodic lines she teases from her harp undercut by skittering drums and warm synth-bass. The song is as luminous, beautiful, and inspiring as its title suggests.

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CLAUDIAH – Everywhere

It’s been a particularly soulful start to this week’s Fresh Faves, and Claudiah’s Everywhere keeps up the streak in lush, luxurious style. We may be saving our Christmas songs until Del’s end-of-year roundup, but Everywhere is as comforting as it is joyful, its enchantingly twinkly hook proving that sparkles aren’t just for the festive season.

Set over a bassline as inviting as a velvet-upholstered armchair, Claudiah’s restrained but powerful multi-layered vocals harmonise with themselves in the fluttering idiom of 90s girl-group R&B. In her own words, Everywhere is ‘about a love so profound that it’s felt in every moment and discovered in every place’, and every detail of its arrangement and lyricism bears out this enveloping, soft-focus sensuality.

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GIRL FOR SAMSON – Cigarette

Psychedelic-indie trio Girl for Samson may hail from Kansas City, but press play on Cigarette and its funky bass, baggy-beat percussion, and Inspiral Carpets organ accents will fire you straight through a wormhole to 90s Manchester or Liverpool. In its synthesis of cool-cat detachment and oracular yearning, the lead vocal recalls the pleasing retro-pop tang of La’s frontman Lee Mavers, a comparison matched by the track’s gleaming popcraft.

Cigarette is carved from clattering, grooving instrumentation which the impeccable production clips into a crisp and catchy shape, giving every part a chance to shine rather than clumping it all together in a foggy purple haze. Girl for Samson’s fifth album, Blend all the Seasons, is due out at the beginning of 2025. What a way to start a year!

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HOLLY HENDERSON – Leggy Man

Maidstone composer and multi-instrumentalist Holly Henderson seems to be making huge waves. Championed by everyone from Frank Skinner to the good people of BBC Introducing, at the age of 28 she’s already worked with too many clients to count, across film, TV, advertising, and more.

If her sprawling list of achievements isn’t proof enough of her talent, then the absolutely charming Leggy Man certainly is. Described as ‘a proposition of peace to a spider that has moved in’, the track is at once intimate and richly stirring, scampering along on a bed of spidery guitar, swooning violins, and sunny electric piano splashes. Recorded in an attic, it’s not inconceivable that the odd arachnid might have dropped into the session and, doubtless, scuttled off feeling very flattered indeed.

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JEKYLL – Plasticine

Our next track is from another of Frank Skinner’s recent favourites – the man clearly has taste, and he’s not alone. 6 Music regulars Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens are among the many voices to have praised Blackpool rockers JEKYLL, who ‘tackle themes such as grief, love, obsession, dissociation, inner darkness, and OCD’. Still, despite such personal subject matter, the lyrics’ bank-bursting musical backdrops are anything but self-contained.

Plasticine, a thundering mini-epic in under four minutes which nonetheless roars and keens like Radiohead in full Paranoid Android mode, is an invigorating jolt to the senses and the speakers alike. Riding a dense wave of bristling hard-rock guitar which breaks into a spray of soaring vocals, if you’ve found yourself harbouring a lot of pent-up angst, you could do a lot worse than to stick this on and wail along.

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LAURA REZNEK – Endeavours

Something much softer now from Vancouver’s Laura Reznek, whose gentle-as-snow vocals are wonderfully redolent of Elliott Smith on the tinkling, twinkling Endeavours. But where so many introspective, wintry ballads threaten to float off into the aether, the song’s rich arrangement of piano, guitars, and loping percussion lends it an uncommon weight and depth, its emotional core brought to vivid life through the mournfully scraped fiddles which colour the chorus.

Always touching but never overbearing, the song only builds in emotional power as it spirals along. It perfectly evokes the frost-covered austerity of the outside world in December while radiating a fireplace-warm glow. As we head towards midwinter, what more could you ask for?

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MUTUAL BLUE – Skydive Eyes

Beautiful songs, cutting lyricism and a refreshing sincerity, all wrapped up in chorus drenched guitars.’ That’s what Fulham indie-kids Ed Parsons, Aidan Scott, Jack Lester-George, and Peter Zurakowski – aka Mutual Blue – aim to bring back to the alternative rock scene. With its breathtakingly romantic electric guitar landscapes, as bracing as a gust of crisp mountain air, the panoramic pop of Skydive Eyes seems to suggest that they have succeeded.

Mutual Blue may cite the Smiths, the Stone Roses, and Ride as their prime influences, but with their Curtis Mayfield-inspired name and near-ideological devotion to resolutely un-laddish melodic sweetness, there’s surely a splash of Orange Juice in their philosophy too. This skydive is a plunge worth taking.

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RICHARD PIERCE – Theatres Of War

Author, poet, activist, and champion of new music Richard Pierce has come crashing into the Fresh Faves with Theatres Of War, a brief but brilliant ‘outcry against wars everywhere’. On top of a suffocating electro-industrial churn, Richard’s lyrics paint a choppy, abstract, simple but deeply disturbing picture of the suffering wrought by war: ‘planned genocides, fire, metal, sand, blood’.

‘But these aren’t plays,’ Richard reminds us at the end of his litany of destruction, ‘there’s no curtain call’. It’s over in less than a minute, but its haunting afterimage lingers, a harrowing reminder of war’s heat, fury, and barbarity in an age when news and social media can so often package human tragedy as a sterile, distant commodity. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be relevant, but this is far from an ideal world.

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SONUS ANIMAE – Next Sound

Sonus Animae is the pseudonym of Warsaw’s Aleksander Kaczmarski. As a graduate of Music Laboratory and Akademia Dźwięku, he brings a sonic scholar’s expertise to wonderfully wrought chillout nugget Next Sound, a track so addictively funky and warmly relaxing it would no doubt make Zero 7 proud.

Opening with a tasty flurry of slap bass, its puttering percussion and electric piano hook ease it into a catchy groove while brain-tickling beats, sighing electronic choirs, and cosmic swoops of synth wind their way around that bassline like serpents round a caduceus. It’s like something ambient-house geniuses the Orb might have cooked up if they got their heads out of their laptops a bit more often. As cool as it gets.

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PS from Del: 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.