Reactionary Reviews | Newish Music Round-Up | 4 October 2026 This week's round-up of newish releases from Spoek Mathambo, Loatinover Pounds, Mila Smith, Birdie, VERMOOR, Shortstraw, and Celeste Noxx.
Under These Stars, Nothing Is Too Far | Spoek Mathambo | Teka
Fuck yeah, that's what we all need, a bit of Spoek. At three tracks this EP is a bit of a cocktease but I'll take it.
Kisses Under The Blue Light coasts down a country road under the moonlight, riding a flying carpet made from the hairs of Sun Ra's dreadlock, woven between the thighs of Bootsy Collins' sequencer, and fast. Spoek rides fast in the dark with the lights off, there could be nuns ahead.
Under The Stars, Nothing Is Too Far is a vast cacophony of groove, grind, anthemic and grand, reaching out for dawn, hosts of angels urging onward.
Told You So And The Never Wrongs is classic Spoek melodic chanting, with guitars filtered like solvent traces, building to an ecstatic break, bass like the ocean on a summer's day.
Should be listened to under lasers and the influence of endless youth.
Ground 2 Glory | Loatinover Pounds | Punyete Premier League/MODAR
Oh man, Loatinover's album starts with such a smoove jam that my cats started making out. Ground 2 Glory is nothing short of luxurious. Elements of all the Pretoria-esque genres, spitori, trapcardi, amapiano, old school RnB, combine in a melodic flow of slow jams that will start and end every weekend this summer. Lux, lux, lux.
With features from A-Reece, Mo Sufi, Khalee G, Mochen and others, over synth pads dripping with Lovage vibes, and vibes and vibes. Such fucking vibes. Punyete Party is case in point, never has looking at girls' tattoos while talking to her outside a club sounded so much like a religious calling.
The time signature of Pounds and co's flows abstract against the hard tock of snare, undulations of keys, someone is wearing a velvet robe in the production booth.
Henny & Backwoods is so fucking lush I could hardly stand it, the kind of track that deserves five guys in the background moonwalking, while Pounds walks through a Japanese garden at midnight lit by the search beams of a police helicopter.
Ground 2 Glory is lush lux vibes, earnest and magnificent and easily breaks the record for number of times “eish” is intoned in thirty-six flawless minutes. The flutes kick in and the synths swell, Supa Lakka.
Not My Circus | Mila Smith | Platoon
Not My Circus is the Lake America of pop-punk. A pop punk album that's not pop punk. It's just, like, grindingly pop, with some guitars in it. And I mean grinding. Producers Greyling, Mulder and Reid are no Stock Aitken Waterman.
On track four Smith autotunes, “Your songs all sound the same.”
Spot it you got it.
Matimu | Birdie | Hifadhi
Back in the old days Matimu would have been filed under World Music, which is the polite way of saying I love the melodies but I have no fucking idea what anyone is saying because I only speak English. That said I love the melodies.
With contributions from DiTeboho Kobedi and Ziyawakazitha Matsenjwa, alongside musicians including Djivas Madeule, Tlale Makhene and Thabang Tabane, the album blends African jazz, Afro-soul and Xitsonga musical traditions.
Matimu is more than the sum of its parts though, it is a progression of longing, grounded and ethereal. From Hi Wena Mani?, an incantation walking up from a stream, through Ndo Newa, a swinging sweet groove, to the gathering bassline, pulling rhythms and urging lyricism of the title track, Matimu is full and open and flows through in ways I cannot describe.
Ons Geskiedenis | VERMOOR | Bandcamp
With an album cover that features both white and black crosses, these Afrikaans nut jobs aren't fucking around.
Spear of Destiny meets Ennio Morricone, with a touch of Deliverance soundtrack performed by Meat Loaf's backing band, Ons Geskiedenis is as grand and ambitious as it can get for a black metal outfit from Bloemfontein.
And it gets black this metal, sheets of it pile up in distorted layer after layer in waves of intoned gruff despair. Oh, the hair at these gigs must be wondrous. The whole album smells like amyl nitrate and strobes. And when they shred, they shred like history itself is coming for them. Every track is The Greatest Song In The World.
Necessary because even IT techs need to blow off some steam. Fully deserves the descriptor symphonic, but just, you know, metal. So very fucking metal.
Everything In Between | Shortstraw | Boosh Music
A band that has always existed in the liminal space between Desmond & the Tutus and Matchbox 20, Shortstraw have returned after a five-year absence and the pertinent question is… why?
Lou Reed once said something like... all you need is a singer, a guitar, the bass and some drums. He was wrong.
The EP features a track called Schrödinger and it's a dinger. Lyrically it sounds like someone half watched season two of Dark Matter and applied to it “love” as a concept. Someone with as much of a concept of love as they do of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.
Liberatingly inoffensive, Shortstraw are the politically neutral version of The Kiffness that we had no idea were there in the first place.
PS: The Tutus/Matchbox 20 thing is something that I have said about Shortstraw before, seeing as we are recycling material.
Plague | Celeste Noxx | Bandcamp
Flying chainsaws on the distant horizon as the sun sets, a violin is on fire and a mad priest dances on the muted veld trying to switch off the flames with faith. Plague is an album constructed from broken air conditioners, bottles of flies, and the madness of rain in a dying star.
Celeste Noxx is some kind of savant who has found themselves caught climbing over an electric fence, the clicking zaps around their burning hair.
Which is to say that Plague is an abstract ambient album that is distinctly not for listening to while on acid. Unless dread and fear are your thing. Without the acid you'll find Plague to be almost sunny, if the sun is that dying star droning Eraserhead sometime in the distant future.