Focus Music Notes. "Out of the Blues". Popular music through the decades

Never the kind of band to act in uncertain haste when it comes to their music, each song off Flyte's debut album The Loved Ones feels like something to relish, to mull over, with a deeper, unfolding resonance. In the school of Grizzly Bear, Alt J, and Fleet Foxes, Flyte have used their four voices to guide their sound, avoiding crashing cymbals and layers of electric guitars in favour of a more carefully constructed approach. The Loved Ones is the result of years of enlightenment and friendship. "The Loved Ones is for the thoughtful listener. Like a book you can open and read from start to finish. An album you would listen to on headphones on the bus to school, that is yours and no one else's," says lead singer Will Taylor. Today Flyte release their exceptional debut 10-Track LP, and to celebrate their album release, the four-piece reveal the first instalment of 'Behind Sliding Doors', which documents early sessions in the studio, from the perspective of p

In December 2016, a man and his rescue dog drove out to Joshua Tree in the Southern California Desert. Armed with a guitar and “a shitty 10-year-old laptop,” the genre-spanning maverick spent two weeks screaming into a microphone at two in the morning and bleeding over his guitar strings in between walking his dog under the cool, arid night sky and barely sleeping at the “weird house” he rented. That man was Mondo Cozmo (the dog just goes by Cozmo, you can hear his input on the raucous ‘Come With Me’). They left the desert with the artist’s 2017 full-length debut, ‘Plastic Soul’ in tow. ‘Plastic Soul’ is a genuinely unique, impassioned collection of ten songs. It has to be one of the most intriguing, exciting and impressive debuts to be released this year. Having already been tipped by Sunday Times Culture as a ‘Breaking Act’ and with every track released to date being named a ‘Best New Track’ in NME, as well as support from BBC Radio 1 and Radio X, this year looks set to belong