Albums of the week: Robert Stillman, The Cribs, Jenny on Holiday, Kris Davis and the Lutosławski String Quartet

10,000 Rivers

Robert Stillman

(Orindal)

A composer, saxophonist and touring member of the Radiohead side project the Smile, Robert Stillman avoids easy categorisation, working across ambient, jazz and film scores. This is true of the American musician’s latest solo album which, rather than align with those billings, takes bold steps into songcraft.

After studying national character on his 2022 LP, What Does It Mean to Be American, the Margate-based expat now examines a specific subtype: Californian techno-utopianists of the 80s and 90s. Their high priest Steve Jobs is the subject of the title track, its wispy, analogue keyboard pop a departure from Stillman’s austere catalogue.

The album is particularly interested in the jumped-up coders’ mission to streamline the messiness of life. Stillman responds with some gloriously abstract, gnarly pieces that trade off with other soft-pop tracks capturing the smooth sounds of the era (Knowledge Is Free!). Gently, mellifluously, No Off explores the seductive nature of Jobs’s pared-back aesthetic, and the nihilistic tendencies that perhaps lurk within it. Meanwhile the glorious retro maximalism of Reality Distortion Field has hints of the Beach Boys gone psychedelic. Kitty Empire

Selling a Vibe

The Cribs

(PIAS)

Few bands inspire such cult loyalty as the Cribs. Their impeccable run of early records (The Cribs, The New Fellas, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever) helped define mid-00s indie, making awkward, northern and gloriously unpolished music feel like a statement.

The title of the Wakefield trio’s new album may be on the nose, but it gives an idea of where they stand now. Once marked by tension, noise and bloody-mindedness, they have made a decisive shift towards warmth and cohesion. More than 20 years after their debut, Selling a Vibe finds the Jarman brothers settled and reflective. They aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel or incite dancefloor chaos. Tracks feel tidy and familiar, missing the reckless energy of their predecessors. Nothing here is cataclysmic: lead single A Point Too Hard to Make scratches the pop itch, while Looking for the Wrong Guy offers a cathartic confessional. There is little to inspire pint-lobbing; instead, the album captures a band no longer chasing the urgency of youth. Georgia Evans

Quicksand Heart

Jenny on Holiday

(Transgressive)

Where the British avant-pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma’s first album, I, Gemini, was full of strange, crepuscular nursery rhymes, by the time of 2022’s third LP, Two Ribbons, Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton had been thrust into cold reality after the death of Hollingworth’s partner aged 22. Quicksand Heart – a temporary solo venture, as Jenny on Holiday’s pen name suggests, rather than a split from the band – arrives as a defiant, often euphoric and hugely emotional step in the grieving process.

Like her work with Let’s Eat Grandma, there’s a sense of wide-eyed wonder to the purity of Dolphins, or the Wizard of Oz analogies of the album’s title track, but there is also grit and a hard-fought sense of hope that only comes from wading through the mire and pushing to the other side. There are sky-reaching synths on Every Ounce of Me and tenacious emo leanings on Pacemaker, while the closing track, Appetite, is a paean to vaulting every hurdle in your way: “Is my appetite just so damn strong that it’s making you feel small? / I’m chewing you up / I’m moving on.” Lisa Wright

The Solastalgia Suite

Kris Davis and the Lutosławski String Quartet

(Pyroclastic Records)

The pianist Kris Davis is one of jazz music’s most imaginative players. Across her 26 recordings as a leader or co-leader, the Vancouver native has spanned modernist trio compositions, big band-influenced swing and solo introspection. Her latest release marks the first time Davis has written for piano and string quartet, producing eight tracks of neoclassical orchestration.

Inspired by the climate crisis, the album takes its title from the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term for homesickness for a lost version of a place you still inhabit. It is imbued with tension and unease: lilting melodies create an ever-shifting foundation on the opening track Interlude, while eerie scrapes and bowing on Towards No Earthly Pole play like ghostly omens. The staccato phrases of The Known End interweave with Davis’s fast-paced runs to deliver anxious drama.

Davis’s writing for the Lutosławski String Quartet is nuanced and immensely expressive, moving from the legato lament of Ghost Reefs to the erratic scratching of Pressure & Yield, evoking the violent fissures of an Earth in crisis. Davis is a great chronicler of our times, making music that is as much a cry for help as a call to action. Ammar Kalia

The 19-year-old singer-songwriter Mulaa Joans has already released two promising EPs, but she’s not satisfied. “My next EP will maybe be too personal,” she says. “If I’m not sick to my stomach because I’ve exposed too much, something’s wrong.”

Joans’s songs brilliantly depict new relationships freighted with insecurity and compromise. Posting TikToks daily throughout her early teens, she started with soul covers then graduated to making her own music. As school stifled her creativity, she left as soon as she could, moving from Bath to London. In 2024, she released £70 for Peace of Mind, a set of seven sharply worded songs packed with punchy rhythms; a British teenage take on Frank Ocean or SZA.

This was followed by last year’s excellent single Still a Little Something (captioned online, “slept with my ex then wrote this”) and an EP, Nighttime Religion, detailing “a situationship that was more a humiliationship. He’d text me all hours of the night and I always went ... like a religious thing”.

Mulaa’s music’s more intense now; sparser, with better arrangements and vocal technique. Songs such as Phone Sex and Members Only showcase her imploring voice over piano or strings (or unaccompanied in a Soho window in her TikToks) and share Lana Del Rey’s fascination with intoxicants, tarnished glamour and shifty male behaviour. Damien Morris

Mulaa Joans plays London’s the Social on Wed 14 January; Phone Sex is out later this month

Photographs by Richard Burch/Steve Gullick/JOH EOOM/Kelly Davidson/Joel Smedley