Albums of the week: Ethel Cain, Amaarae, The Black Keys, Monzanto Sound

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You

Ethel Cain

(Daughters of Cain)

Her most devoted fans bridle to hear it, but Ethel Cain took Lana Del Rey’s doomed American damsel aesthetic and doused it in trauma: sexual violence, self-harm, suicidal ideation. Cain’s debut, Preacher’s Daughter, unravelled the tale of how Ethel (real name Hayden Silas Anhedönia) came to be murdered and eaten. Yet unlike Del Rey, and despite radio-friendly moments such as American Teenager, Cain’s no-chorus queen. Her second project, Perverts, offered molasses-paced slowcore where her most interesting work emerged in the languorous intensity of her verses. Willoughby Tucker, a Preacher’s Daughter prequel about teen Ethel’s first love, melds the two previous albums to forge something brittle and beautiful.

Less reliant on echoing drums and vocal effects than usual, Cain’s pellucid tone pierces the dark of her songs superbly. Recognisable if not always relatable characters drift through her lurid lyrics while interstitial instrumentals avert the album from power balladry. The aggressive solipsism of her first record is abandoned, or better disguised. Fuck Me Eyes is glorious, a six-minute movie masquerading as a song. The countrified, gently lambent lament Nettles is her prettiest tune yet, while the Cure-like hypnotic epic Tempest feels bleakly astonishing. A startling success. By Damien Morris

Black Star

Amaarae

(Golden Child/Interscope)

Ghanaian-American artist Amaarae has a reputation for conjuring an exuberant, playful and braggy pop world, singing of self-love, money and pleasure, all while weaving together Black diaspora sounds. Now on her third full-length album, Black Star, she’s taking that global energy to the club: this is still a slinky, fey, distinctly Amaarae record, but one that throbs with humid bass and sleek dancefloor energy. It makes for a strutting collection teeming with sex, sweat and hedonism (at one point on the second track Starkilla, she sings the refrain “ketamine, coke and molly” like it’s a nursery rhyme).

Throughout the album, Amaarae flits between swaggering rap and coy sing-song over colourful, collagist beats that reference everything from baile funk to bassline, highlife to house. The party atmosphere is consolidated by a supporting cast: a surprise voiceover from Naomi Campbell and a soft, glowing bop with artist du jour PinkPantheress, both their sugary voices building into something infectiously sweet, straight out of 90s Ibiza. A joyous, freeing release, Black Star seems destined to be the soundtrack to all the good parties this summer. By Tara Joshi

No Rain, No Flowers

The Black Keys

(Easy Eye Sound/Parlophone)

It’s strange, listening to the Black Keys’ lacklustre 13th record, to think back to a time when the Ohio duo’s name was regularly uttered in the same breath as the White Stripes (admittedly to Jack White’s chagrin, even then). At their commercial peak on 2011’s El Camino, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s retro-facing sensibilities had a robustness and swagger; on No Rain, No Flowers, the pair retain the radio-friendly populism but without the personality beneath.

On this album, they bring in a host of storied songwriters including the frequent Lana Del Rey collaborator Rick Nowels and, less predictably, Scott Storch (50 Cent, Nas). Perhaps the extra voices are partly why some tracks sound like they could have been sung by anyone, such as the title track, with its football montage positivity, or the Kings of Leon-lite The Night Before.

Make You Mine finds more satisfyingly string-led, harmonic ways to develop despite uninspired lyrics about “mak[ing] you mine/ wasting my time” (a problem throughout) and the pointed hook of Man on a Mission is a highlight that calls back to early Kasabian track Cutt Off. But overall, it’s hard to work out what the band’s point of view is now. By Lisa Wright 

The Channel

Monzanto Sound

(None More)

South-east London has been an important incubator for British jazz over the past decade. The Mercury prize-nominated drummer Moses Boyd and the tuba player Theon Cross cut their teeth in Catford, while the improvisatory collective Steam Down still host regular gigs in Peckham, nurturing new talent. Quintet Monzanto Sound are the latest group to add to this lineage with the release of their soul-influenced debut The Channel.

Building their sound at venues such as the New Cross Inn and Avalon cafe, the group are impressively tight. Drummer Wazoo Baden-Powell and bassist Anthony Boatright lock into the syncopated funk of easygoing number Pepper Dem, while guitarist Rachel Asafo-Agyei’s minimal picking gives rhythmic shape to Mali Baden-Powell’s languorous Rhodes chords on the hip-hop-influenced Slick Talk. Singer Mimi Koku’s husky vocals, meanwhile, round out the ensemble, veering from whispered intimacy on the dubby Black Gold to soaring ad-lib melodies on Foxy Cotton.

It all adds up to a confident debut that revels in a mid-tempo, head-nodding atmosphere. There is scope for more changes of pace. and dynamics But on their first outing, Monzanto Sound show themselves to be promising carriers of a jazz legacy fostered south of the river. By Ammar Kalia

Marcus Brown, AKA Nourished By Time, was on the verge of quitting music before releasing his debut album, Erotic Probiotic 2, in 2023. Recorded in New York, Los Angeles, London and his parents’ basement in Baltimore, and funded by a decade working in retail and construction jobs, the album quickly earned cult status for its skilful blend of lo-fi indie and R&B, and its affiliation with London’s cutting-edge record label Scenic Route.

As his alias suggests, Brown has a penchant for transforming vintage-sounding samples into rich soundscapes: he is a digital archivist remixing Baltimore’s eclectic musical history. In early 2024, his Catching Chickens EP reaffirmed his talents: Hell of a Ride, a sharp breakup anthem, built on his explorative sound and paired soulful, loose vocals with biting social commentary over euphoric 80s-inspired dance beats.

Nourished By Time’s second album, The Passionate Ones, also charts his home town’s musical landscape, while exploring love, existentialism, dreams and disillusionment. Baby Baby combines buoyant electronic-indie instrumentals with astute, deadpan lyrics such as: “If you can bomb Palestine, you can bomb Mondawmin / Buy anything, just buy it fucking often / Yeah, turn your fucking brain off.” Here, as elsewhere, he creates escapist anthems while confronting the reality of a failed American dream. By Georgia Evans

The Passionate Ones is released on 22 August via XL Recordings

Photographs by Dollie Kyarn/Larry Niehues/Andrew Goss/Lauren Davis