SHEHERAZAAD - 'KHUDGARZI'

Formats

• ERATP181LP - LP

  3700551787067

Details

‘Khudgarzi’ (English: Selfishness), is the anticipated follow-up to the American songstress-producer-theatre artist Sheherazaad’s highly praised 2024 EP ‘Qasr’. The record encompasses a woman's forensic deep dive into the space between duty and autonomy; sacrifice and survival. While composing, Sheherazaad became consumed by the figure of the so-called Khudgarz Aurat – the "Selfish Woman" – a label she had heard since childhood, levelled at women whose desire for agency was often met with suspicion or exile. "Selfishness became a kind of silent prayer," Sheherazaad recalls. "A portal into a haunted universe of anxieties and desires. I was made to fear a 'selfish' kind of woman – embracing her felt like stepping into a forbidden forest I'd been running away from." Written in the aftermath of a broken engagement, 'Khudgarzi' carries the emotional debris of rage, guilt and grief, while imagining an alternative mythology populated by women who shapeshift between storytellers, courtesans, historians, survivors and witnesses. Across ten theatrical pieces, Sheherazaad refuses neat resolutions, instead creating an oral archive where feminine survival is neither sanctified nor condemned, but revealed as an ongoing ritual of performance, strategy and insurgency. Alongside the album’s announcement, she shares "Andhera" (Darkness), an album centrepiece. The song emerges from the same shadowy universe first conjured by last year's single "Gulukara". It’s a Bolly-goth pop hymn, following a vilified lover who ushers in cosmic darkness, transmuting heartbreak into something vast, mythical and the deepest pigment of darkness. Musically, 'Khudgarzi' expands the wilderness of Sheherazaad's signature dystopic folk-noir and dark pop sound, where instruments from Hindustani, Turkish, Arabic and Carnatic traditions – including tanbur, santoor, veena, rabab, ghatam and gungaroo – intertwine with weather recordings, breath, echoes, moans and the sounds of the animal world. Resultingly, every song becomes its own self-contained universe: an enchanted back alley, a desert wasteland, a rain-soaked steel plant, or an artificial constellation suspended in silence. Mostly sung in Urdu, with passages in English and Tamil, the album explores layered questions of language and belonging. Throughout, Sheherazaad preserves the intimacy of room noise and stillness, allowing spacious arrangements to absorb the brooding lyricism. "So much music feels like an assault to me," she says. "I want to open a gentle rupture, where a listener may truly sit with herself." The songs came together like a diasporic family across disjointed time zones: recorded between Brooklyn, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with fragments arriving from Istanbul, Islamabad, and Trivandrum among others. A cast of more than thirty musicians contributes to the project, including Ria Modak, Sarathy Korwar, Jay Chakravorty, Shunya and Qasim Naqvi, while emerging India - based artists Irfana and Daatri Dadhich appear as sympathetic co-narrators. Though born from an exploration of selfishness, the record ultimately became an exercise in shared storytelling and generosity. Neither villain nor virtue, 'Khudgarzi' presents selfishness as instinct and reclamation. Rather than offering answers, Sheherazaad leaves space for listeners to navigate their own relationship between sacrifice and selfhood, illuminating a world of contradictions that lingers long after the final note.

Tracks

1. Qatil 2. Pakeezah 3. Registaan 4. Gulukara 5. Mard 6. Haqeeqat 7. Andhera 8. Zeher 9. Kohinoor 10. Haqeeqat II

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THE FAMILY BATTENBURG - 'SUPER DELUXE'

Formats

• SBR124 - LP

  5060853707117

• SBR124CD - CD

Details

Cardiff's The Family Battenberg make their Stolen Body Records debut with Super Deluxe - ten tracks of home-made '70s glam, garage-punk heft and bubblegum pop from one of South Wales' most riotous live bands. Led by the single "Bed Bug" - an all-out hipshaker done and dusted in 2:51 - Super Deluxe bottles the chaos of the band's live show, veering, as Clash put it, "from Marc Bolan to Jack White." Fresh from SXSW, The Great Escape and support slots with Getdown Services, this is glam-punk entertainment with the fuzz cranked all the way up. For fans of T. Rex, The White Stripes, The Stooges, Slade and Ty Segall.

Tracks

1. Cattle Driver
2. Fuzzy Features
3. Bed Bug
4. Feed Yer (Nganga)
5. Silver Doggy
6. Hold Me Like a Woman
7. Brand New Boy
8. I Wanna Be Your Bitch
9. Leatherguy
10. Me and My Mother

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Audio & Video

al.so - 'PORTUNES'

Formats

• LTR067 - LP

  4066004773155

Details

al.so, the exciting new quartet of Berlin and London’s most creative improvisers delivers a debut EP portunes that luxuriates in the spacious rural landscape in which it was created and the intuitive freedom found between a first-time meeting of musicians: keyboardist Moses Yoofee (Moses Yoofee Trio), harpist Miriam Adefris (Flur, Floating Points), saxophonist Marius Max (Sonic Interventions), and modular synthesiser expert Robert Henriques (Philip Glass, Patti Smith). First brought together as part of a curated opening lineup for the 2022 edition of Berlin’s XJAZZ Festival, al.so realised their shared musical language and decided to bring their capacity for freeform improvised explorations to Robert’s family home in Gloucestershire, England in October of the same year to experiment on record. Jamming instinctual ideas without a rhythm section, the group was free to explore beatless sound scaping and textural sonics informed as much by the autumnal British landscape as by the analogue gear and equipment each musician had brought with them. The result is a beguiling body of work that references Floating Points’ electronic scoring as much as Philip Glass’ evocative minimalism and the spiritual jazz melodics of Alice Coltrane. Across the EP’s six tracks, each composition confounds expectations, creating ambience that refuses to fade into background music but rather demands attention through the surprising twists and turns of its development. portunes is a break from the chaos and freneticism of the world we live in, a space where we can take our time to sink into the soundworld of these four musicians who are each operating at their peak, drawing on vast and varied musical experiences. The EP will be out on limited edition vinyl and across all digital platforms on November 20, 2026 via LEITER.

Tracks

1. RADIAL 2. AS IT TILTS 3. HOLLOW HILL 4. THE TWIG 5. PORTUNES

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