For our first Singles Bar feature of 2025, we’ve brought together an interesting selection of tunes. You’ll find a “typical” Real Gone backbone of rock, but with the help of some great, spiky synth sounds, a couple of singer songwriters, and even a country infused bar room sneer from a familiar musical figure, there’s enough here to attract anyone with a curious ear. As we prepare to embark on another year of great musical discovery, we hope you find something of interest here!
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Although the shoegaze and dreampop genres will be forever associated with the early 90s, there have been a wealth of great bands and artists keeping the flame alight in the twenty first century. 2024 saw some great releases from Keeley, Set Feux, Sunder, Newmoon, and many others. Even scene stalwarts like A Place To Bury Strangers were hugely prominent with a run of digital singles which gained some very positive online press.
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the individual tracks that have landed in our inbox over the previous few weeks. This selection takes in a couple of pop-ish tunes, a pair of tracks from bands that are still very new, and even a singer songwriter offering that blends huge melodies with a strangely prog-like flair. As always, we hope there’s something here for everyone, and if you like what you hear, it’s worth exploring some of these artists further…
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Over the first six months of 2024, Real Gone received hundreds of submissions for the Singles Bar. Naturally, not everything appealed, and with only eight tracks featured every week, there were various great tracks that also fell by the wayside. Our Singles Bar “Summer Special” rounds up some of the best sounds that didn’t find a previous home. It would’ve been a travesty not to share such good music, but in a couple of cases, we’ve even included material that really should have featured at the Singles Bar around the time of release. Within this batch of twenty top tunes, we’ve pulled together some very retro sounding pop-rock, something with a huge late 60s sound, a couple of gothy bits, a nod to Americana, and even a slice of trad folk. We hope this round up of bits and pieces introduces you to something new, and maybe even inspires you to check out more material.
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Celebrating their thirty fifth year in the music business, Manchester’s The Speed of Sound have pulled out all the stops for the follow up for their critically acclaimed 2021 release ‘Museum of Tomorrow’. As it’s title suggests, ‘A Cornucopia’ offers fans a whole bounty of music, and the band have split that into three volumes. The first disc, ‘Minerva’ is a fourteen track indie-ish journey which explores a musical universe that takes in jangling retro guitar work, 60s fuzz, a bit of power pop and a few other styles.