Steak’s ‘Acute Mania’ (released via Ripple Music in 2022) presented a brilliant dose of stoner rock. Just as important as sharing some great riffs, the album boasted the kind of production job that made the London based heavyweights sound even heavier. The guitars adopted a tone somewhere between doomy and fuzzy – often making the band’s Kyuss influenced roots more than obvious – and the drums punched through everything with a genuine intent. In stoner terms, it offered the kind of professional sound you’d expect from a major label band a quarter of a century earlier. In short, ‘Acute Mania’ was a contemporary stoner classic.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
QUIZ SHOW – XONO EP
Quiz Show’s 2024 EP release ‘Flotsam’ often played like a musical love letter to the alternative rock boom of the 90s. Taking influences from Superchunk and the earliest, noisier works of Buffalo Tom, and occasionally applying a quietLOUDquiet approach to the arrangements – as per Pixies and Nirvana – it gave fans of the grunge era lots to enjoy in a small package. ‘XONO’ – shared in the Autumn of ’26 – finds the band, founded by Shudder To Think’s Chris Matthews, sticking to what they know. But that’s something they do very well indeed.
THE SUMMERTIMES – Luminous EP
Back in 2023, The Summertimes released one of the year’s best albums with their self-titled disc. Their follow up release, the ‘Luminous’ EP offers fans (and soon to be fans) more of the same in many ways. Rather than suggesting a lack of imagination, it proves that the Aussie power pop band knows instinctively where their musical strength lies and, as a result, the five songs that make up the short release sit very comfortably alongside the previous LP’s best material.
OUI PLASTIQUE – Spirit / The Persuaders
In the summer of 2026, synth pop act Oui Plastique shared ‘Linger’, a single which straddled a cold mood and a melodic heart, making no secret of a love for early 80s Ultravox. As a preview of an upcoming album, it was hugely effective, presenting a very familiar sound in such a way that any obvious recycling – both from the band’s influences and their own past recordings – felt as if it could still be inspiring.
COLIN MOULDING – Want It Bad: The Pep Talks And Playing Fields Of Old England EP
It’s astonishing to think that the release of the three track ‘Want It Bad (The Pep Talks and Playing Fields of Old England)’ comes five years after Colin Moulding shared ‘The Hardest Battle’, but the XTC man has never been the most prolific of recording artists.