Singles Selection – Issue #30

The return of Liverpool alt-rock four-piece Toy Car sees the band embracing a heavier sound that moves between spacy voids of suspense and contrasting rushes of speedy guitars.

Toy Car have been gathering quite a following since their 2025 debut album, Cream, exposed them to the wider world. Their music draws on influences from the likes of Pearl Jam and Wunderhorse.

Reason is tight and punky, driven along by a sharp, heavy drumbeat. Guitars riff and soar around frontman Sean Hough’s gritty, burning vocals. It’s energetic, intense, lighting-paced and explosive.

Barbaros Evin is a Turkish-born, London-based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose specialism is a high-voltage blend of alt-rock and grunge. His debut solo single, Blue Eyed Wolf was released back in August and now, hot on the heels of that debut, comes single #2.

Forgive Me, Son is a search for truth and regret – and an expression of hope for a better world.

A huge, grungy intro sets the theme, before giving way to a heavy, pensive, vocal passage. The sound is underpinned by a resonant, 70s-flavoured bassline and Barbaros’s vocals are passionate and agonised. Guitars fuzz and swirl around the room and throughout the song. Forgive Me, Son is a big, big statement of a song.

Ten months on from his triumphant 2026 album, First Light, Sean Taylor is back with a fine new single. And, instead of the pull-no-punches polemic that we’ve come to expect from this most directly-spoken of artists, with A Kiss From the Heart, Sean shows us that he’s well-capable of mellow expression.

“A Kiss From the Heart is a love song about being away from home,” explains Sean. “I love touring but I do miss those that I love when I’m on the road. There is a beautiful light installation by the artist Tracy Emin at St Pancras Station that reads ‘I want my time with you.’ St Pancras Station is often where my tours begin and this line is referenced in A Kiss From the Heart.”

Written by Sean and his friend Mike Seal, A Kiss From the Heart will be the closing track on Sean’s next album, scheduled for a 2027 release and titled Make the World Bad Again. The song is articulate expression of Sean’s biting drive to turn the world into a song. His lyrics are a statement of how music can smooth the path of our existence and, particularly, provide that special spark that ignitews our relationships.

Sean’s voice is grittier and far, far more intimate than his regular listeners will have come to expect. indeed, he’s almost whispering as he delivers lines like: “A kiss from the heart; a poem from the soul. Joni singing Blue.” Picasso and Miles Davis also earn a mention in his reveries and it all hangs together delightfully. Sean’s alone with his piano for this one, and that pared-back arrangement just enhances the overwhelming sense of intimacy.

“And then there three”, as wrote every ever known music scribe, as the nation’s favourite newly (further) trimmed down folk-prog band set out their new stall. Nancy Kerr and a rhythm section may not immediately entice, but this is no normal rhythm section, as we well know; Alex Hunter and Tom A. Wright have always packed way more punch than their weight. Plus, in Wright, here is a drummer who can turn his hand also to guitars, piano and synths. And here does.

This is a song Kerr has covered before, in her purer folk shoes; indeed, she wrote it. Some studio noise, a repeating piano phrase and a deliciously bobbly bass line introduce the song, Almost (but not quite) jarring clashes of sound then beckon in her Kerr’s familiar lilt.

Clocking in at over 7 minutes, little else actually happens, but the melodic mantra becomes swiftly hypnotic, not least a as toy piano dream sequence drifts by. FX judder in and out, as percussion attaches the sort of scaffolding fit for a public hanging. It might not offer freeform dancehall fever, but there is a certain end of a night noir that makes up for all that.

Ending as a guitar driven electrical storm sweeps over the sky, all is well in Magpie land.

Who’da thunk it, a seasonal song that even your worst old heathen/humanist/curmudgeon can equate to! Yes, it’s that time of year, when Sanders & Savage hook up with Gilmore & Roberts, sandwiched in with Jade Rhiannon, for a celebration of all things Santa and snow adjacent.

The mood is all mellow mid west Texas, with a flickering banjo and languorous shuffle of drums. A voice, then two, then three all strike up, as what sounds like a steel guitar offers a sun slowly setting, The sound couldn’t be more Emmylou, Linda and Dolly, even if they were trying to capture that lost genie. Fiddle and touches of echo improve it still further and if this is Christmas*, bring it on! (*Other festivals are available.)

It is all so lovely I don’t even need, or want, to hear what the words may even be about. Deck the halls!

Kazdoura is a Toronto-based band that serves up Arabic fusion with a modern twist. So say the duo themselves, and it feels likely to be true.

A slinky disco bass line sneaks out, over a rhythmic beat, before it goes all cocktail jazz exotic, if but briefly. The vocals dance in, with handclaps, and it is thence a dance between the separate strands, vocal and instrumental, all fitting together with a strange, if odd, satisfaction. Even the occasional swoosh of Dik-Mik style sonics sound exactly what the Caliph ordered.

If you like the idea of Donna Summer locked in a minaret, with a khat crazed version of the Blockheads, you are only part the way there. That this Syrian-Lebanese outfit, singer Leen Hamo and multi-instrumentalist John Abou Chacra, are based and recorded this in Canada, adds only to the mindwarp.