Welcome to the 2SER New Music Report – featuring all the new music on your 2SER airwaves this week across your Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs!

ALBUMS:

Elme – bird of the year (OS)
Gus Englehorn – Horn Book (OS)
Lily Hiatt – Forever (OS)
Marcus Index – Where Diamonds Suffocate (L)
Maribou State – Hallucinating Love (OS)
Rabbit – Spiritual Growth (AU)
Shrapnel – Sedan Crater (L)
Telopea – Savona (L)
The Dare – 369 Days (OS)
The Laughing Chimes – Whispers in the Speed Machine (OS)

SINGLES:

Brother Ali – Mysterious Things (OS)
Derya Yildirim and Grup Simsek – Direne Direne (OS)
Olivia’s World – Sourgum (L)
Rebecca Vasmant – Rooted (OS)
Rita Satch – Meet me in the garden (AU)
Shady Nasty – Screwdriva (L)
The Pretty Littles – Taking on water (AU)

Shrapnel, the local mainstays centred around Sam Wilkinson, have featured a revolving cast of members over many years. As notable music journalist and fan Randall Shrub noted, they are “a band with people in it”.  Their seventh studio record Sedan Crater has arrived, and finds them pushing and poking into the odder and more discomforting reaches of rock and roll. A reference to a 1960s nuclear test, it’s explosive stuff, a self-described “tightrope walk between artificial intelligence and genuine stupidity”, and out now on Omnipest Records.

Marcus Index (fka Spookyland) has just released his third solo studio album. Entirely self-produced, it’s a masterclass in abstracted reference and introspective balladry. Where Diamonds Suffocate was inspired by a desire to “…explore the dream world, commune with the dead, and pay homage to the early 20th-century Spanish poets, whom he counts as his greatest inspiration”. In comparison to his previous work, such as Private Music (2023), this latest is more direct, heart-rending and stylistically diverse.

The third album from singer, guitarist and nomadic prophet Gus Englehorn finds the (currently) Hawaii-based former-pro snowboarder diving deeper into shamanic guitar-pop and psychedelia. The Hornbook (a reference to medieval rote-learning devices) was mixed and mastered with Paul Leary of The Butthole Surfers and is a joyful dose of phantasmagoric escapism.

The plectrum-grinding second album from nipaluna/Hobart four piece punk outfit Rabbits just dropped today (independently) and it’s a ripper. Recorded on the Derwent River, Spiritual Growth rages against various banalities in modern life, from the personal to the universal and inscrutable.