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Manchester Music

Mother Issues in a Hazey Hues: Baby B’s Pretty Boys Is Shoegaze Pop for Modern Dating Rot

Posted on 7 August 2026

Baby B stripped the glamour from superficial lust while swathing her hypnotic harmonies in shoegaze distortion on Pretty Boys. The Stockport-written single is dreamy, anti-good-girl pop with the Shoegaze trifecta of distortion, reverb, chorus and saturated delay, lifting her reinvention of mythology as she explores the Oedipus complex in the context of modern fuckboys attempting to get their fill and find a feminine fix while offering nothing in return.

If Sabrina Carpenter were truly reverent to the roots of the genre she has co-opted and watered down while hitting all the right cerebral spots lyrically, her manufactured music may just carry the beguile of Pretty Boys. This one is for the lovers, and the ones who refuse to sate the desire of those whose complexes drive their libidos and dictate their Tinder swipes. If Pretty Boys reached the top of the charts, the male loneliness epidemic would undoubtedly become much lonelier. We can only hope and pray.

Behind the single is a trailblazing artist who finds the beauty in the mess of being human, writing from the perspective of someone trying to stay soft while resisting the urge to burn everything down. Following support from Spotify’s New Pop UK and BBC Introducing Manchester, Pretty Boys is the first glimpse into her forthcoming all-female-produced EP, created with Alex O’Shaughnessy and Luz Corrigan. Manchester should be ready to make her as seminal to the music of the region as Joy Division.

Pretty Boys is now available to stream on all major platforms.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

A Diorama of Everything Fragile: Methyl Orange Pushed Cinematic Electronica to the Emotional Brink with ‘Caught in Thought’

Posted on 3 August 2026

https://soundcloud.com/methyl-orange/caught-in-thought/s-nUyxUhfX5jx?ref=clipboard&p=i&c=1&si=599BB0D3402F46F480D17D71FEB547AE&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Compositions that threaten to move you to tears don’t come around all too often, but the searing sublimity within Methyl Orange’s latest cinematic electronica score, Caught in Thought, nearly pushed me over the brink.

Through the kind of composition that pulls every one of your hidden emotions to the forefront, Nick Wall distinguishes himself as a composer instead of a mere producer. The way he charges his orchestrally cut progressions with rushes of emotion, almost as though he has presented you with a diorama of everything fragile and beautiful in your inner world and encased it within a plaintive vulnerability, gives the landscape of his sonic design far more than visual imagery to contend with. The evolving synths and guitars reach straight into the emotional core.

Adding to the emotive intensity of the release, there’s an apocalyptic glow to Caught in Thought; splinters of material reality seem to drift around as detritus in the mix, rather than just harbingering the audience as so many artists are inclined to do in our renaissance of existentialism era.

Methyl Orange has released music since 2017, absorbing inspiration from Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream alongside the cinematic influence of John Carpenter, so it is little surprise he’s such a cultivated instrumental storyteller.

It is releases like this that make me proud to be a Mancunian; you can keep your Ladchester hits, I’ll take Mancinema in the form of Methyl Orange instead.

Caught in Thought is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Burgaboy Lit Up the Luxe Life by Turning Drill, Grime, Garage and Bassline into a Summer Clubland Detonation with ‘Champagne and Restaurants’

Posted on 25 May 2026

After refusing to stylistically restrict his sound, Manchester’s Burgaboy has stormed from strength to strength, reaching his hard-hitting zenith with Champagne and Restaurants, a kinetic drop determined to send dancefloors into overload. Before Bassline became his language, hip-hop and R&B shaped his early world; one Manchester party shifted the frequency, and once the code clicked, he turned that energy into movement.

Champagne and Restaurants rampages through the intersections of drill, grime, garage, and Bassline, with bouncy techno-tinted happy hardcore elements acting as the catalyst of the anthem, which exhibits Burgaboy’s chameleonically expansive vocal range. From spitting tongue-in-cheek emcee vocal hooks to harmonising to bring soul into the mix, Burgaboy knows exactly how to make his hits high-octane in the most hedonically kinetic way possible.

The strobes of heat through Champagne and Restaurants against the sticky-sweet licks of lust make it the ultimate bass-heavy summer hit.

His vision now reaches beyond club edits and one-off moments. Burgaboy is building full Bassline bodies of work with the ambition to push the sound into album territory, treating it as a world-class force rather than a regional footnote. Manchester raised him, resilience sharpened him, and Bassline gave him the flag to raise.

Champagne and Restaurants is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Methyl Orange Fixed a Krautrock Gaze on the Sick Collective Psyche in ‘Important Things’

Posted on 30 March 2026

Important Things EP by Methyl Orange

Methyl Orange has launched a synthwave meditation with Important Things that, if everyone got caught in the tides simultaneously, tomorrow would be a very different day. The Manchester project of sonic architect Nick Wall has spent years building immersive instrumental worlds, and this release sharpens that vision into something pointedly humanistic. Since 2017, Wall has steadily grown a dedicated following through a prolific catalogue, with 2025’s Lost for Words drawing strong praise, before 2026 opened with a top-three placing in the Radio Wigwam Awards’ Best Electro Act category. Important Things feels like another decisive step forward.

Advocating for empathy, equality, and compassion rarely translates into a hypnotically stylised sonic experience that leaves you increasingly arrested, but this cinematic feat of expansively stylised electronica is no ordinary strain of synthesised fare.

The cinematic scope is panoramic as Methyl Orange delivers spoken-word mantras over cold cosmic synths that nod to krautrock’s pioneers while keeping their gaze fixed on rectifying the sick collective psyche of the present, an individualised navel-gazing downward spiral race to the top. There’s power in the softly spoken repetition, in the slow unfurling tension, in the way the track holds its nerve and lets the message land without dressing it up in cheap sentiment. John Cooper Clarke and Kraftwerk alike would approve of this message.

Important Things is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify and Bandcamp.
Review by Amelia Vandergast

Manchester’s Mat Thorpe Confronts Widespread Malaise in the Sermonic Dark-Folk Reckoning of ‘Jaded’

Posted on 20 March 2026

As a fledgling goth coming of age in Manchester, fellow native Mat Thorpe appeared more as a monolith than a cornerstone in the city’s scene. His presence behind the decks at goth nights and his performances with The March Violets and Isolation/Division kept the alternative undercurrent vital, alive, and reverent to Manchester’s post-punk legacy. That lineage runs deep, and now, writing and performing under his own name as a solo dark-folk spectre on the airwaves, Thorpe is summoning sermonic atmospheres entrenched with ritualistic energy and iconography.

His seminal piece, Jaded, stands as a hymnal intersection between post-punk influence and pagan folklore. The track addresses widespread malaise through vivid imagery that flashes past you while you are harbingered away from letting apathy swallow you whole. There is something almost liturgical in the pacing as the instrumentation draws from traditional folk textures while allowing cinematic shadows to gather at the edges, reflecting both Manchester’s industrial ghosts and Thorpe’s own lived past.

The final crescendo is the epitome of an aural reckoning. That symphonic visualisation of overcoming adversity to find the light lands as a broadsiding cinematic touch, promising far more as Thorpe continues to explore his talent in uncharted territory. For those who hold New Model Army close to the soul and playlists alike, Jaded feels like an ethereal awakening rooted in grounded conviction.

Jaded is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Bandcamp.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Swap Fairylights for Strobe Lights with Rick Holden’s Latest Mix, Hardstyle Christmas

Posted on 16 December 2025

Manchester producer Rick Holden wished his followers a very Hardstyle Christmas with a high-octane seasonal riot that tears away from polite festive playlists. Across this hardstyle mash-up of tongue-in-cheek house and techno, he lines up kicks and synths to get your heart thudding in sync with explosively energetic beats. Forget archetypal Christmas singles; who genuinely needs another saccharine sleigh bell-heavy track that reeks of desperation to claw its way to Christmas number one?

Hardstyle Christmas exemplifies Holden’s ethos as a producer who lives, breathes and bleeds hardstyle, yet still has time for a cheeky wink at the sillier side of the season. If you are the kind of raver who would happily switch fairylights for strobe lights and the King’s speech for filthy bursts of bass, Hardstyle Christmas digs deep under the skin, especially when the drops tumble in like a rave siren call for the misfits who treat Boxing Day as recovery day. It is the sound of tinsel getting ripped down in favour of laser beams and fog machines.

Holden has roots in Droylsden on the Manchester map, where he first started sketching out tunes on home computers in the early 90s before graduating to a Roland XP50 and Cubase, then on to DAWs stacked with modern plugins. Across his catalogue, he toys with dance, trance and hardstyle, folding them into uplifting, melodic, high-energy cuts that carry a proper cinematic streak.

You can hear a sideways nod to the Euro-dance titans he grew up on, from Cappella and Sash! to Scooter and Harris & Ford, though Hardstyle Christmas feels wired to his own instinct for euphoria. The track works as a seasonal in-joke and as a peak-time weapon, perfect for anyone who wants their December soundtracked by kicks and synths instead of crooners and choirs.

Hardstyle Christmas is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

UK Folk singer-songwriter SOPE rendered ‘Real Love’ into his debut EP, Frame 1

Posted on 7 November 2025

SOPE has given us a teaser of what’s to come on his debut EP, which is set to arrive in early 2023. Just as it feels like there’s another world between your waking world and sleep, the standout single, Real Love, exists as a semi-lucid meditation that lets down every conceivable defence. Standing naked, without the façade of heavy-handed production, through the candour of lo-fi saturated tape deck delay, SOPE wears his heart on his sleeves and gives the airwaves his shirt.

To juxtapose the raw wounds bleeding through the track, which allow you to imagine what Bon Iver would sound like if he took a few production tips from Elliott Smith, there’s an artful stringed folk crescendo, allowing the emotion to arrive without the posturing of grandeur. The result is an ache-soaked artefact of vulnerability, pinned to a spectrally grounded soundscape

The UK-based indie-folk project formed around a sound that drifts between organic warmth and electronic subtlety. Written and recorded in Manchester, SOPE’s debut EP Frame 1 captures the cinematic nature of memory; Real Love forms its most emotionally stark frame. Lyrically rooted in love, rebirth, and the quiet persistence of hope, it’s a song that leaves the listener more open than before. Fans of Sufjan Stevens, Nick Mulvey, or Mk.gee will recognise that same tender balance between introspection and expanse.

Follow SOPE on Instagram to stay up to date with news of his release.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

BABY B spilt spirals of distortion and dream pop etherealism in her seminal single, Because

Posted on 30 September 2025

BABY B will turn rhythmic pulses inside out with her seminal single, Because. The way the shoegazey oscillations in the intro spiral into alt-indie distortion before moody synths and glassy 80s-esque harmonies cut through locks you into the vignette of a mind unspooling. Before a single lyric is relayed, the atmosphere has already atomised the senses. When the words arrive, they blur confession with disorientation, weighing the fine line between affection and affliction until it becomes impossible to separate the two.

The crossover magnetism is undeniable. The former dance-pop artist has thrown herself into one of the most essential alt-indie releases of the year, one that could be devoured by mainstream pop listeners while still holding enough etherealism to draw in dream pop devotees. It’s a rare synthesis, proof that the alt and pop worlds need not run in parallel when one artist can hold them both in the palm of her hand.

Behind BABY is Manchester-born songwriter Sarah Blanchard, who has spent over a decade writing hits for other artists, her pen fuelling tracks that have collectively amassed over a billion streams. With long-term collaborator Richard Boardman, formerly of Delphic, she has built a cinematic yet intimate sonic world that feels like a long-overdue arrival of her own alchemy. Released through AWAL, Because is only the beginning; the industry would be skewed beyond reason if 2025 didn’t see BABY ascend to the recognition she so clearly deserves.

Because is now available on all major streaming platforms.

Follow BABY B on TikTok and Instagram to stay up to date with all her latest releases.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Manchester’s new indie rock powerhouse lit up the scene with ‘Something More’

Posted on 28 September 2025

Whether or not there was room for a new band of prodigal indie rock sons in Manchester, The Streetlights stormed in regardless with their debut single, Something More. With a little less swagger and snarl than your average Madchester outfit, The Streetlights refused to rely on hands-tied-behind-back bravado. They didn’t sink sardonic postured angst into their inaugural track; instead, they let their guitar strings and heartstrings find an affecting synergy in the track that writhes like a hybrid born between the emotive hypersonic intensity of Muse, the stylistic indie chops of Catfish and the Bottlemen, and the raw dejection of Fontaines DC.

As the lyrics write new romantic existential philosophy, it’s likely that The Streetlights will find the ‘more’ they’re lyrically searching for; and that will come in the form of rapturous applause from across the industry. Discernibly, they’re built for more than the venues up and down Oldham Street, and we’ve no doubt they’ll reach it if their sophomore proves even more mettle.

Something More is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Scuzzy Spoken Word Post-Punk Soaked into Alt-Electro Funk Salvation in Hük’s ‘ I Saw the Light’

Posted on 12 September 2025

With Hük’s latest single, I Saw the Light, the floodgates open on scuzzily debauched alt-electro that carries more funk than a men’s locker room after a spin class. The unmistakable snap of a Manchester accent slices sardonically through synths engineered for the new space age, as I Saw the Light steers murky disco grooves deep into Half-Man Half-Biscuit-style post-punk territory. It’s the sort of track that will have you wondering if Manchester’s own poet laureate has swapped verse for spoken word sermons, as bleakly thematic imagery spills through every menaced syllable.

Instrumentally, Hük masterfully take sounds that would register as a novelty in other hands and rework them into a work of ironic, brain-bending satisfaction. There’s no need to test your IQ in the future, just make sure I Saw the Light sits proudly on your playlists. The four-piece, comprised of Rob Bennett (vocals, guitar, occasional theremin), Jo Wadeson (bass, vocals), John McElroy (synths & samplers), and Paul Gunter (drums), have made a home for themselves in Brighton, but the North runs thick through their sound and attitude. Born as a studio project and now a full live band, Hük prove with this release that post-punk electro funk is alive, bristling, and always smarter than it looks.

I Saw the Light is now available on all major streaming platforms. Find your preferred way to listen via the artist’s official website.
Review by Amelia Vandergast

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