All year we’ve been blessed with some truly excellent new music from around the country, and that looks set to continue through summer.

First up, local duo Beryl have just released their debut full-length album Dry Peel Crack. Beryl are vocalist/guitarist Gabriella King and multi-instrumentalist Alex Jasprizza, who teamed up with producer Blain Cunneen to record this. The feature album on 2SER all this week, it’s an elaborately composed and wide-ranging collection of baroque art-folk that drifts between sparse and acoustic soundscapes, as well as emotionally charged and often jarring rock, which is underpinned by a constant sense of considered melancholy. It’s a beautiful and captivating debut, and you can also hear 2SER’s Mitch Lumsden catching up with them for our Local Artist Spotlight segment here!

Belfast-based producer David Holmes is possibly best known as a member of Unloved, and less so as a film composer, but he has returned with his first solo artist album since 2008. Blind on a Galloping Horse is a dance record at heart, and features a number of excellent tracks with vocalist Raven Violet, but at the same time is themed on the societal and environmental decay of the the last decade, both in the UK and around the world. In amongst it’s excellently produced beats and synthesisers are  news clips and spoken word accounts featuring Afghan and Ukrainian refugees in Belfast, a Palestinian ambulance driver and French and Irish observations of post-brexit UK.

Released last month via the excellent Altered States Tapes label, Wilurarrakutu is a beautiful, unique and hypnotic album by Keanu Nelson, a musician from the remote community of Papunya, 150 km from Alice Springs. It’s a slow-building and entrancing record, in which Nelson overlays his own vocals, performed in both language and English, across stripped back Dancehall rhythms. It’s a seriously excellent and haunting record and one which demands to be listened to in it’s entirety.  Vinyl copies can be bought direct from Altered States Tapes bandcamp (linked below)

Also out this week (atleast physically) is the sixth studio record from Sydney’s own Perry Keyes. Regarded by some as among the countries greatest songwriters, Black and White Town is a direct and authentic dose of poetic Australiana that is written a snapshot of stories that reflect the harder realities of our city in 2023: homelessness and of “people trying to hang onto each other amidst the economic displacement of the inner city”. It’s true local stories of hardship and gentrification told through a sympathetic voice and packed with many references to well known Sydney locales. Available via bandcamp on cd (with streaming next year). 

Further afield, London based soul vocalist Summer Pearl‘s sophomore album just released Outmasystem via Kitto Records, and expertly blends Jazz, Soul, Dub and Hip Hop into a series of melancholic yet uplifting tracks that are themed on breaking addiction, love and coping with hardship, while also showcasing her undeniable skill for free-flowing lyrical delivery.

There are also some fantastic singles out in the world this week from Mparntwe-based punk firebrands The Stellar Sea as well as Bayang and The Nagging Doubts. Plenty more if you want to scan the list at the top (or even better, the 107.3 airwaves).

*Are you a musician or producer and looking to have your music played on 2SER? We’d love to hear from you.

Please send it through to Submitmusic@2ser.com with a downloadable link (in wav or 320 mp3 format). Be sure to include the release date, your location and any bio, epk links