It’s time for another album review round-up. This week, we have new releases from Mariachi el Bronx, Felsmann + Tiley and Charli xcx, plus albums from KMFDM and Lapêche that were released in the past few weeks.
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New Music from Sébastien Tellier, Kula Shaker and Sam Quealy
Technically, this is last week’s batch of album reviews, but I put the list on hold until today. Sébastien Tellier, Kula Shaker and Sam Quealy all released new full-length albums on January 30. Musically, they are all very different, but, each one is quite worthy of your attention. Check out the reviews and then follow the links to find where you can stream or purchase them.
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Sextile, Pixel Grip + More of What You Heard at Synthwaves 1/23/26
View from the DJ booth at Synthwaves, 1/23/26 Last night was Club Underground x Synthwaves at the Grand Star. I played the second half of the night in the Synthwaves room, upstairs. Crowd was great, as always. I was happy to get to work in some Italo disco at the end of the night and to close with “Cherry” by Chromatics, which I don’t play out all that often. For those of you who were there, thanks for dancing! Set list is below. New-ish stuff, basically 2025 releases, link back to other mentions here on Beatique.
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Robbie Williams on “Morrissey” and Britpop + More New Music
I’m trying to catch up on new releases, so the following reviews are for music that came out in January, but not necessarily today and, not everything released on January 23, 2026 appears in this post. This week’s batch of reviews includes Robbie Williams Britpop, The Cribs Selling a Vibe, Maria Somerville Luster (Remixes) and Draag Miracle Drug. Keep reading for the details.
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Xiu Xiu’s Creepy Covers Album + More New Releases
Xiu Xiu Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to all of this week’s new releases, but I managed to sit down with a few of them, including Xiu Xiu’s new cover album, Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1, Sleaford Mods The Demise of Planet X, Sylvia Black Shadowtime and Tigra and SPNCR Black Rice. Scroll down for the reviews.
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Album Review: Dry Cleaning ‘Secret Love’
“Hit My Head All Day,” the first single and lead track from Secret Love, the latest album from Dry Cleaning, has been in DJ queue for months now. It’s a song that I keep meaning to drop into a set, but for some reason haven’t yet. It’s such a weird little jam, a slice of ‘80s-style post-disco for the 2020s doomscroller with echoes of Flying Lizards and Dominatrix and the title repeated throughout the song. It’s slow— languid, really— which is probably why I haven’t played it out yet, but the groove is tight. It actually feels like you’re dragging yourself through another day of bad news to the beat of a world that’s on the verge of collapse, which is a very fucked up way to describe a song that you like, but its also art. It’s not supposed to be all hands-in-the-air escapism all the time. And there’s a catharsis that comes with that.
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Purity Ring Builds a Better World On Stage at The Novo
Purity Ring at The Novo 11/12/25 (Pic: Liz O.) A few songs into their set on Wednesday night, Megan James of Purity Ring thanked the crowd for masking up. She talked about a world where we are “caretakers of the land we live on,” where there are no prisons or genocide. “It starts at home with material care for others,” she told the crowd, “like wearing a mask. No one is going to save us. We care for each other. We keep each other safe. Free Palestine.”
The night began with security passing out masks near the entrance to The Novo It ended with guards near the photo pit handing out water bottles to people in the crowd, something I have never seen happen at a show before this one. All of this connects to Purity Ring’s new, self-titled concept album, which was released in September. Inspired by RPGs like Nier Automata and Final Fantasy X, the album is itself a soundtrack for an imagined game, wherein the characters’ quest is to built a better world.
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Why I Went to the No Kings Rally in Downtown Los Angeles, 10/18/25
A balloon of Donald Trump as a scowling, oversized orange baby in a diaper floats over the crowd at No Kings events in downtown Los Angeles on 10/18/25 (Pic: Liz O.) Right in front of Los Angeles City Hall, a massive inflatable Trump, scowling, raccoon-eyed and decked out in a diaper, hovered over the crowd. “Dump Trump” read the sign just below the inflatable, a caricature of the former reality TV star as an Oompa Loompa positioned like a turd hanging from the big orange baby’s bottom. Not too far from there was an old, worn couch tagged with “JD Vance was here.”
In the crowd, there was a zooful of people dressed in inflatable animal costumes, hippos, bears, chickens and, of course, frogs, amongst them. People hoisted signs loaded with dick jokes and memes. But, it wasn’t all comedy. “If there’s money for a parade? Then there’s money for Medicaid,” read a sign posted on a trashcan. Refuse Fascism set up an installation with photos of those who have been disappeared.
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Top 5 Beatique Stories of 2025 (So Far)
Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer ordering a ’90s coffee house cappuccino For a good while, Beatique was just a personal blog where I would post my playlists, updates on gigs and the occasional story. In January, I figured I should turn it into a regularly updated music and culture blog that’s still very personal. Now that we’re near the middle of the year, I’m happy to say that the project is going well. There are new posts most weekdays. Interviews are a regular feature, with at least one running every week. There are also album and live reviews, event recaps, record store spotlights and the occasional rant.
Not to brag, but even I’m a little shocked that I’ve been able to post that much in between working two jobs, one of which involves a lot of writing, without using AI. It’s actually because journalism is my day job that I started putting some actual effort into the blog. Music, arts and culture journalism— which has been my beat for my entire career— is in a dismal place. It’s not just that I missed getting the music and alt culture assignments that never really came back after lockdown, but I missed reading stories that aren’t about the World’s Most Boring pop star and TikTok hits. Basically, I’m writing what I want to read, so thanks for joining me on the ride. If you want to stay up-to-date, sign up for the new mailing list. Newsletters will go out on Thursdays beginning this week and it’s free. The only thing I’m adamant about with this project is that there will be no subscriptions or paywalls.
Please share what you like, whether it’s on socials or just directly with your friends. I’m not interested in the quantity of readers so much as the quality of them, so if you know someone who is all like, “I’m really tired of paywalls on stories about social media posts,” then send them this way.
I debated whether or not I should post the Top 5 stories of the past six months because I don’t want to judge a story by how much traffic it gets, but I think these five stories are also reflective of what you’ll find here and what I have in store for the future.
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Cyrnai Embraces “Found Experience” and Future Sound on Calamity of Beauty
Cyrnai, aka Carolyn Fok Carolyn Fok was in Los Angeles, cleaning out her late father’s house, when she discovered the statue of a woman, reclining in a seductive pose amidst the odds and ends stored in a dark room. She shined a flashlight through nearby glass and snapped a photo for what would become the cover of Calamity of Beauty, her latest album as Cyrnai.
Fok, who is also a visual artist and writer, refers to these kind of moments as “found experience.” As a child, she found a drum machine that her father made and began playing around with it. “He didn’t give it to me, I just found it and I found a lot of things,” Fok says on a recent video call. “He would leave secondhand instruments in the living room and I started putting things together as a teen, so finding this statue was like, oh, did he want me to find this too?”
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