Albums of the week: Guedra Guedra, Margo Price, Blood Orange, Brigitte Beraha and the Lucid Dreamers

Mutant

Guedra Guedra

(Smugglers Way)

The second full-length album from the deft-fingered, electro-acoustic producer Guedra Guedra douses club music of the northern hemisphere in the colours, perfumes and cadences of the global south. Like an inverse Diplo – the US producer who co-opted global sounds into his club bangers – the Moroccan musician Abdellah M Hassak is on a mission to decolonise the dialogue between dancefloors and non-western music.

Mutant is rich in both field recordings and up-to-the-minute sounds, a hybrid of many African sources whose ambitious mission statement never quite overrides the music’s core calling: to slap. The track Drift of Drummer is equal parts djembe patterns and analogue synth siren call, while Ring of Fire is hectic, reminiscent of Syrian wedding singer and producer Omar Souleyman’s work, with nods to Chicago footwork built in.

The murky yet kaleidoscopic Z contains abstracted, chopped-up curlicues of north African instrumentation. It’s not all borderless, saucer-eyed fun though. Quieter, more expansive tracks such as the vocal-led Tamayyurt – featuring singer Foulane Bouhssine – or Enlightenment point to Hassak’s skill with lower BPM textures too. By Kitty Empire

Hard Headed Woman

Margo Price

(Loma Vista)

Despite living in Nashville, Margo Price was overlooked for years by the city’s country music establishment until she was spotted by Jack White, who signed her to his Third Man label for her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. Since then she has followed the outlaw country tradition of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, happy to take her own path rather than the one dictated by Nashville orthodoxy. Hence 2023’s Strays, a psilocybin-fuelled deviation into psych-imbued  sounds.

So it’s a slight surprise to find her returning to more traditional territory so quickly on Hard Headed Woman. Thankfully, the material here is so strong it doesn’t really matter. With her backstory, including poverty, jail and the death of one of her sons, there’s the sense that Price knows the pain of which she sings on Losing Streak and Love Me Like You Used to Do, the latter a heartbreaking, end-of-the-affair duet with Tyler Childers. Elsewhere, the irrepressible momentum of Don’t Wake Me Up – a duet with Jesse Welles – shares DNA with Subterranean Homesick Blues and the White Stripes’ Hotel Yorba. Price may be back on familiar ground, but few do it better. By Phil Mongredien

Essex Honey

Blood Orange

(RCA)

The Essex-born, New York-based artist Devonté Hynes has kept busy in the six years since his last full-length record under his Blood Orange alias. He has scored films, supported Harry Styles and performed with the London Symphony Orchestra. Essex Honey, the fifth Blood Orange album, is about returning to the comforting, tender guitars of his youth, while considering past lives and places left behind.

Less pop-facing than ever, it swells with feeling: vocal harmonies that ebb and flow; skittering pulses of drums; murmured conversation; meandering cello and sax; flecks of electronic distortion, and piano cutting through plumes of lush synth. Though there’s a host of guests (Tirzah and Mustafa are standouts), Hynes largely submerges collaborators into his explorative universe. Sumptuous production is a common thread in Blood Orange’s work, and here things feel rich but also fragmentary. A disorienting refrain – “I don’t want to be here any more” – recurs, while songs melt into one another and drift between sonic worlds, never quite settling where you’d think. By Tara Joshi

Teasing Reflections

Brigitte Beraha and the Lucid Dreamers

(Let Me Out)

Brigitte Beraha likes to explore, evolve and subvert – qualities that have helped push her to prominence in British jazz. A versatile vocalist, she can sing with ethereal purity, loop into wordless sound and throw in an occasional snatch of spoken word. It’s an appealing jumble, especially when allied to offbeat, philosophical compositions and a demon band.

Born to a British mother and a Turkish father, Beraha can also deliver playfully remodelled standards, as on Tea for Three, a trio album from earlier this year. The Lucid Dreamers are another, fiercer matter; a highly intuitive lineup of Tim Giles on drums, George Crowley on tenor sax and bass clarinet and Alcyona Mick on piano. The opening track, Words, is a short satire on cliched political speech that blooms into blue-sky Brazilian celebration. White Noise does the same in reverse, beginning as a sensuous romance before dissolving into vocal incoherence and fierce blowing from Crowley’s tenor.

The closing What Does It Mean (to Be) is a gorgeous meditation on life and identity “as we travel round the sun”. A daring, impressive ensemble outing. By Neil Spencer

As TTSSFU, 22-year-old Wigan-born, Manchester-based Tasmin Stephens deals in heavy effects and allusive lyrics oozing from intriguing alt-rock textures. There’s indie catnip in Character and I Hope You Die, the latter a bleakly brilliant takedown seething with betrayal. Both are from 2024’s Me, Jed and Andy EP – wonderfully, a fever dream about empathising with Andy Warhol’s diaries. The Cure, Alex G and Ethel Cain (plus Kim Deal’s louring basslines) are touchpoints, but the combinations Stephens makes from them feel raw and new.

An obsessive songwriter, she started uploading songs to SoundCloud at 15, playing guitar, working out how to turn her moodiest feelings into music. By 18 she was dropping singles on Spotify and performing with Duvet, the post-punk band she formed with a friend during lockdown.

Stephens’s first go at new TTSSFU EP Blown “wasn’t hitting like I wanted it to,” she says. “And I wanted it to be perfect.” She called up NewDad and Just Mustard producer Chris W Ryan, who adds a polished viciousness as Stephens parades the breadth of her writing talent. She can still shoegaze on Everything, or make spiky air-punch anthems and grimy alt-pop (Cat Piss Junkie, Call U Back), while Being Young drips wisdom with catharsis. Sick is the pick, bristling with menace then speedrunning into feral intensity. By Damien Morris

Blown is out now on Partisan. TTSSFU tours the UK in November

Photographs by Joanna Bellon/Yana Yatsuk/Vinca Peterson/Monika S. Jakubowska/Henry Collier