The Big Albums Of 2010

Join us as we look forward to some of the gems that 2010 holds for us in the twelve months.

With new albums scheduled (or rumoured) to appear from The Strokes, Aphex Twin, Babyshambles, The Fall and others, it's an exciting period for music fans.

THE STROKES

Album expected in autumn on Rough Trade.

‘Is This It’ from 2001 was regarded by many as the most significant album from the last ten years: New York’s tonic to rock that filled bedrooms with guitars again. It’s a new decade, so can they do it again as big bands look less and less inviting and major labels crumble? Singer Julian Casablancas told Rolling Stone way back in 2009: “We have three songs,” he said. “Some of the new stuff has a ’70s vibe, like Thin Lizzy or Elvis Costello. But then some of it is bizarre music from the future that we’re trying to tone down to sound catchy. So, we’re trapped between the future and the ’70s.”

APHEX TWIN

Album expected in May On Warp Records.

The world’s most reclusive electronic artist has promised a new album. Few dance artists can sell over a million records, let alone one whose music is perhaps the most experimental found in the average iPod, yet Richard James returns. Warp Records founder Steve Beckett told 6Music: “We’re definitely going to be putting out a new album by him. Hopefully it will be this year, if I can prise it out of his hands. It’s definitely on its way.” “I don’t know a single note or anything about it. It will be as much of a surprise to me as anyone else,” Beckett explained. “Basically I find out what it sounds like when we go into the mastering room and he puts it - well how it used to be, he’ll put the DAT player in and there it’ll be - so that’s the first time I’ll hear it. Then I’ll go onto my knees and thank him and then we’ll put it out.”

LAURA MARLING

‘I Speak Because I Can’ expected in March on Rough Trade.

“It’s done!” Laura told Clash recently. “We didn’t want to do too much different. I’m not a particularly pedantic song writer, it’s more like a stream of consciousness. The band did what they did with the arrangements and it sounds fabulous. It’s called ‘I Speak Because I Can’. I wrote it over the last year all over the place; I like writing on the road. Overall I’d say it’s more ‘rootsy’. What do I think will happen in the next decade? They’ll invent a pop machine to write the pop songs.”’

THE FALL

‘Reformation’ expected in May on Domino Records.

John Peel’s favourite band return with a new album. Few people seem to know whether its their thirty-third or thirty-fourth proper album, but we do know it’s called ‘Reformation’ and leader Mark E Smith’s trademarked unpredictability actually led him recently to release a fourteen-track listed rundown of names. It sounds serious. Whether Smith’s ability to continually critique culture’s more flagrant transgressions is our main interest. It’s guaranteed to be a jaunt into murky garage rock with the vitriol of a dying man spat over the top. Whether he can tear modern life’s vagaries to pieces and engage us once more by rebuilding these strips in his own image is more muddied water.

MYSTERY JETS

Album expected in March on Rough Trade.

“The album is finished but we don’t yet have a name,” reveals singer Blaine Harrison. “What we all said was that (last album) ‘21’ was stripped back and we’d all gone back to a kind of pop sound and so we wanted to embellish things but make it sound less fiddly. We wanted to take what was there but make it sound bigger. We also wanted to return to our influences, like we listened to a lot of old (Pink) Floyd and ’70s stuff but with new ears, so instead of listening to it as kids and trying to imitate it we’d take a few of the principals of recording and reapply that. I think the ’70s influences are quite under the skin and not that obvious and are more in the song writing than anything else.”

BABYSHAMBLES

Album expected in Autumn on Parlophone.

“We’ve been knocking together loads of ideas - we don’t work in the conventional way!” confesses Adam Ficek of the band. “We don’t block off time to write and record, it’s very spontaneous; someone will have an idea perhaps even during a show, song ideas sometimes begin mid-set. We try to remember them and change them around as and when. Ideas are constantly being thrown about. I think the new songs are pretty stripped back at the moment. The direction change - if there is one - will probably be suggested at production level. We tend to just write songs rather than have a preconceived idea of a style. They come out as they come out.”

LCD Soundsystem
New album scheduled for March apparently, yet, as ever, the industrious James Murphy is writing, playing and recording EVERYTHING by himself. So, if it’s anything like ‘Sound Of Silver’, then expect him to be peppering the tastemaker charts come December.

Foals
Another spring album from Oxford’s upstarts. Their first album was them discovering dance music. Their second is rumoured to be them re-writing Krautrock having fallen in love with Can and other miscellaneous Germans.

Richard Ashcroft
The Verve’s urban scribe has got a new band together. Adopting the name United Nations Of Sound, Ashcroft and co. will be releasing an album in late March or early April called ‘Redemption’, which is produced by legendary hip-hop producer No I.D. We will see if the drugs have stopped working then I suppose.

Kings Of Leon
A new album is rumoured (and likely) to be out this year, with the band keen to return to glory after ‘Only By The Night’ became iTunes’ biggest selling album of 2009. With a history of following up each album with one that’s even better, expect things from the Followills in 2010. You have been warned.