The Friday Dispatch
Joshua Epithet, Been Stellar, Kiel Smith-Bynoe, Stina Nordenstam and Nina Kinert
Joshua Epithet follows his compulsions and instincts
21-year old, Manchester-based songwriter and producer Joshua Epithet is the first to admit to his preoccupation with fame. He’s obsessed with the internal and external factors that catapult people into the spotlight, and more importantly, how they deal with the fallout when they’re shunned from it. Out of this obsession was born Epithet’s debut record, Boys And Their Video Cameras – released today – a musing on the parasocial relationships we develop with celebrities, child stardom, and on how this can affect a person’s identity.
On the record, Epithet explores this theme through the fictional character of Casey Ryan. The album follows the trials and tribulations of the genderless protagonist, unravelling the fantasy of their fame with a crash back down to reality. Boys And Their Video Cameras is not strictly a concept album; it’s more an album with a strong concept. Epithet wanted to avoid being too prescriptive, as he enjoys the reciprocal relationship between artist and fan, creator and listener.
“I don’t want it to be too boxed in,” he explains. “It’s sort of like a split identity thing. There’s Casey the star, and Casey the fan.” The record is a playful reflection on the duality of these states. Epithet sees the album as “a circle”, following Casey from cosy childhood, through an uncertain adolescence, and into adult mediocrity. “I think it’s kind of cool to portray a life through an album cycle,” he comments, “It’s like you’re growing up with the album.”
Been Stellar and the innate tragedy of language
Disconnection and isolation are the prevailing themes on Scream from New York, NY, the debut record of post punk five-piece Been Stellar, due next month. The brainchild of vocalist Sam Slocum and guitarist Skylar Knapp, references to Knapp’s undergraduate philosophy training and Slocum’s apprehensive embrace of New York City permeate Been Stellar’s first album. Slocum’s vocal delivery lends itself significantly to the subject matter, materialising as dejected and pained, almost gagged by the jagged, whirl-pooling instrumentation. “There's this innate tragedy with language,” Slocum says of the album’s nihilistic lyrical matter. “[Knapp was] really into [Austrian philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein at the time, and one of his big ideas was about how language is a broken tool. We're trying to convey these massive ideas and feelings [but] at the end of the day, it can be pretty upsetting how futile trying to explain it with words is.”
“At the same time, there's a conversation going about screams,” he continues, referring to the album’s title, but also a daily lived experience. “In a place like New York, words fail all the time, and I think you get a glimpse into pretty raw human emotion through something like a scream, whether it's a good scream or a bad scream,” he says. “You hear stuff like that all the time in a place like New York. You might be on the subway, or laying in bed at night, and the person in the apartment above you will just scream. It's something that you grow to feel pretty comfortable with, but when you stop and think, it is a pretty alien and strange thing that we just kind of roll with in a city like this.”
Kiell Smith-Bynoe on Jim Reeves
There’s something about Caribbean women of a certain age, maybe mid 60s and upwards, who love Jim Reeves. I don’t know what that’s about or where it comes from, but my nan was obsessed with him. I remember her asking me to make her a CD with Jim Reeves songs on it, and she wanted this song on there three times so she didn’t have to keep pressing it to go back!
I was a real nanny’s boy. My nan was like my best friend, we were really close. My mum used to work quite late because she worked for London Ambulance Service, so I’d get dropped to my nan’s after school and be there most of the time. I’m an only child, and my cousins were sort of allowed to do whatever they wanted, whereas my mum was really strict.
As she got older, my nan was bed-bound because she had diabetes and had to have her leg amputated from below the knee. Carers would come and move her from the bed to the chair and back to the bed, but she was still sharp in her mind and always funny – always caring, loving and kind. We’d watch TV together and chat. She would ask me to put that CD on. Just great times with my nan – that’s what this reminds me of.
I’ve started going to Barbados a lot more regularly. I only went once with my nan, but my mum used to take me all the time when I was in school. I was like, “Urgh, I’ve got to go to Barbados again! For the whole summer holiday!” I hated it because all my friends were in London kicking a football at a car, and I wanted to do that, and instead I was being dragged around the island. I realise now not only how expensive it must’ve been, but also what a blessing it was to have a place like that, that was like a second home.
They have a thing called Fish Fry on Fridays in Oistins. It’s like a big food market, but there’s also two dancing areas. One for the young people that just want to drink, and one for the older sophisticated people having a slow dance, and they play a lot of Jim Reeves. Those memories come rushing back.
As told to Olivia Swash
Three things to get excited about this week
The book: Released this month, Stray documents the life of acclaimed Bristol DJ and producer DJ Milo, a founding member of Wild Bunch. The book tracks the arc of Milo’s life, from his tumultuous upbringing to travels around the world, all intertwined with a history of the Bristol music scene.
The album: Today, Canadian indie artist Ruby Waters releases her first full-length project, What’s The Point. Ringing in the record with her first sold out show at Toronto’s famed Danforth Music Hall last night, she will begin a headline tour of Europe to support the project in June.
The giveaway: Today is the final call for entry into our giveaway of Jodie Nicholson’s Safe Hands. We’ve got three vinyl copies to send out, and we’ll let winners know next week.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of Best Fit's writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Alan Pedder writes on Stina Nordenstam’s This Is Stina Nordenstam (2001) and Nina Kinert’s CHORALS (2024).
This Is… is not my favourite album from Swedish singer/songwriter Stina Nordenstam, but it’s a close-run second after 2004’s The World is Saved, her sixth and – barring some small miracle – final album. Although she briefly returned to music in 2013 with a sound installation at Gothenburg’s Way Out West festival, we’ve heard no trace of her since.
I’ve chosen This Is… here for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s about to be reissued (7 June), seemingly out of nowhere, marking its debut on vinyl. Secondly, because it’s curiously emblematic of a long-expired time in the music industry when even a notoriously hard-to-market artist could shoot for the moon with some hefty financial backing. More than half a decade on from her commercial peak, public eye avoidant Nordenstam was pretty much the last person you’d expect to partner with Simply Red’s management team and make a pop-leaning record in LA with heavyweight American producers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake. Thanks to Independiente Records (RIP), she even had the resources to film a video for each track, making This Is… one of the first, if not the first, visual album by an independent artist, an endeavour she described in a rare interview as “one whole large mad project” that cost “much more than the production of the record, or at least as much.”
Looking back, it seems insanely ambitious. The fact that the videos were compiled on a DVD that was never commercially released – I have one of a rumoured 50 copies – is really the icing on the cake. But This Is… remains an undersung gem, a disjointed imaginarium of broken characters existing at the edge of hope. Suede’s Brett Anderson guests on two tracks, perfectly matched with Nordenstam’s soft, eerie lilt on off-world oddity “Keen Yellow Planet” and the thudding cautionary tale of “Trainsurfing”. The two singles, album closer “Sharon & Hope” and the pumping, slightly goofy “Lori Glory”, are love stories of a sort. Jagged standout track “The Diver”, too. I think. It’s often hard to parse Nordenstam’s meaning. She sometimes displays a wit so dry that you almost miss the irreverence at play (the album cover is a clue), though there’s no mistaking the sense of low-key optimism at the record’s core. Early CD-R promos bore the alternative title “Welcome to Happiness” (borrowed from track 9), but perhaps that was considered too on the nose. Or simply false advertising. This Is… may imply a definitive version of Nordenstam, but as her ever-patient fans well know, no such thing exists.
By Nordenstam’s standards, fellow Stockholmer Nina Kinert is ferociously prolific. Released earlier this month, her eighth album CHORALS is a companion piece to last year’s excellent Religious, which found her ruminating on the residual trauma of growing up within Sweden’s Pentecostal church community. A more experimental and in my opinion superior record, CHORALS pushes Kinert’s sense of the hallowed to new and unusual extremes. For a record that starts with an audacious, multi-act, 15-minute ode to a popular horror film trope (“Final Girl Circuit”), it’s a remarkably approachable work, Latin chants and all.
As the title suggests, voices of all kinds are central to the sound, and the interplay between natural and unnatural, earthly and unearthly is what gives much of CHORALS its magnetising tension. Revisiting the ‘Ninotron’, a synthesiser that collaborator Daniel Fagge Fagerström built for her 2015 album On Ice, Kinert surrounds herself with herself, often to electric effect. I generally try to avoid comparisons, but there are parts of this album that make a strong case for Kinert as the Swedish Julia Holter (“Final Girl Circuit”, “Lament for UUS”), while fans of Susanne Sundfør’s more esoteric work won’t leave disappointed either. Highlights include the revelatory, Kris Kristofferson-referencing singalong “Help Me Make it Through the Night Helped Me Make it Through the Night” and the Laurie Anderson inspired “Satan Sun, Mother Moon”, but really it’s best heard from the first note to the last.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat among out editors and writers right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Previous Industries, Mabe Fratti, Annie-Dog, Body Meat and coverstar Izzy Camina.