Cal Cashin

UK-based music critic and historian, exploring weird and beautiful music.

Interviews

All of my published interviews to date.

The Quietus •

The Highs are Higher: An Interview with Curbside Lambsear

As caroline's Magdalena McLean and The Umlauts' Annabelle Mödlinger announce their dazzling debut EP as Curbside Lambsear and gear up for this year's Green Man, they tell Cal Cashin about pre-destiny, self-education, and the vulnerability of venturing out from large ensembles The Umlauts’ Annabelle Mödlinger and caroline’s Magdalena McLean will be familiar faces to anyone attuned to the frequencies of London’s many underground music scenes, but their latest project is a delightful left turn. As...
The Quietus •

A Different Beast: Abigail Snail Interviewed | The Quietus

Abigail Snail capture lightning in a bottle and Rad Berms is one of the best debut albums you will hear this year. Cal Cashin speaks to Stef Kett and Will Glaser. Photographs by Alex BonneyThey may have chosen to name themselves after an entirely different denizen of the garden, but it is the zigging and zagging of a pair of butterflies that the vital new free rock duo Abigail Snail evoke so emphatically. Their debut album Rad Berms is all manic elegance and fluttering interplay – an antsy, fran...
Loud And Quiet •

After Party: Cameron Picton follows Black Midi with maximalist baroque folk half-band

One of the brightest, most beloved, and most imitated bands of the last ten years, it was little surprise to many when Black Midi burnt out after a stellar triptych of incendiary records. After the extensive, exhaustive Hellfire world tour, the band called it quits in 2024 with a series of innocuous social media posts. Landing with a bmbmbm but taking off without as much as a whimper.“I think it probably went on a bit long,” Cameron Picton tells me, calling in from New York. “But that happens… I...
The Quietus •

Direct Action Gets the Goods: An Interview with Leather.head

Off the back of an incendiary debut record that was one of 2025’s best rock albums, Leather.head speak to Cal Cashin about the importance of keeping things political, uncompromising collaborations with poet Zia Ahmed, the reclamation of emo and moreLeather.head’s Mud Again, their incendiary self-released debut, was one of the finest and most fully realised rock albums of 2025. The real deal. 


Across its 37 minutes, the South London rascals’ fractured collage of blasted Slint guitars and explo...
The Quietus •

tQ Subscriber Release: Ex Agent

At the forefront of an underground British guitar scene that's thriving against all odds, Ex Agent have delivered an idiosyncratic, ever-shifting, and excellent new EP exclusively to tQ subscribersNever did we think it could get this bad. Alongside the frankly evil cost of living, prohibitively expensive rehearsal spaces, and the fact that even finding a grassroots venue in which to make strange noise can be an arduous task, it is a very bleak time to be a young band in the UK. And yet, against...
Loud and Quiet •

O: "Most drummers would be able to pick up juggling" | Loud And Quiet

O golly, O gosh, O boy, O wonder. O can perhaps be compared to contemporaries like Sons of Kemet, who mix their jazz training with thunderous songcraft to create music that is more about momentum and motion than melody and harmony. Indeed, despite connections in London’s fertile jazz scene, O have more in common with dozens of other genres than they do with jazz.  “I did a lot of stuff that I’d say was more in the jazz world,” Keary says, having cut her teeth as part of the Tomorrow’s Warriors i...
Loud and Quiet •

Wu-Lu: community spirit, post-genre creativity, and rose-ringed parakeets - Loud And Quiet

Wu-Lu is Miles Romans-Hopcraft, producer, multi-instrumentalist, tamperer, but he doesn’t make all the music on his own. He’s the head chef, with a cast of chefs de partie in the wings. “Sometimes,” he says of his compositional style, “it will be me, in my bedroom, with the MPC, getting all close. That might transpire into something I’ll show to the band – they might play on top of it, or incorporate it into our set.“Or,” he continues, “I’ll get together with the guys, hang out, chilling and jam...
The Quietus •

Thirteen Convulsions: Geordie Greep's Favourite Albums | The Quietus

Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep takes Cal Cashin through the thirteen albums that have gripped him the most, from the majesty of Bach to the mania of Léo Ferré Geordie Greep, frontman of precocious noise-rock combo Black Midi, has always been a somewhat elusive and mysterious character. He gives little of himself away in interviews, and his Twitter account is largely dedicated to boxing. This distance often comes across in his lyrics, as he masks himself behind absurdist narratives and cryptic...
The Quietus •

If You Know, You Know: An Interview With Iphgenia Baal & Ben Graville | The Quietus

Compliances: A New Fear, from Toothgrinder Press, combines the apocalyptic imagery of photographer Ben Graville and the caustic prose of Iphgenia Baal. Cal Cashin talks to the pair about working together and the depressing state of publishinglife was like that already… now it’s the same only worse

That is the proclamation of London novelist Iphgenia Baal at the start of her latest book Compliances: A New Fear. Part faux-psychology textbook, part fictionalised journal (much like 2017’s Merced Es...
Loud and Quiet •

“We pied the Oliver Cromwell Museum” – you have to have fun as a new band, say Lunch Money Life - Loud And Quiet

Apocalypse music. That’s what they called it. When Lunch Money Life released their lurching debut album Immersion Chamber in 2020, they were all too happy to label their bastard inversion of jazz as music for armageddon. But things are a bit more nuanced now.“It feels crass now, in hindsight,” electronics maven Jack Martin would later tell me, about what Lunch Money Life used to brand their work. “I believe in it to the extent that the world is fucked up, and we make fucked up music – not the mo...
The Quietus •

Wok Ethic: EXEK interviewed | The Quietus

Albert Wolski's EXEK take the production burnish of early Eno, the invention of This Heat and the medicated funk of ESG as a starting point, says Cal Cashin, before heading off into psychedelic territoryEXEK by Sandra Mikołajczyk

"The studio as instrument” is a mode as old as time itself, yet it seems there is a dearth of guitar groups who adequately utilise this concept in order to harness maximum psychedelic power. Often groups strive to replicate their live sound, get an Albini in, and cross...
The Quietus •

Brassed Off: Emma-Jean Thackray’s Journey From Village Band To The Cutting Edge Of Jazz | The Quietus

Portraits by Matthew Benson

Emma-Jean Thackray’s singular brand of jazz is a heady and unique cocktail. Yorkshire-born, the musical polymath leads her band with virtuoso trumpet performances, mixing genres as though they’re fresh ingredients making up a potent solution.

Thackray’s own studies of jazz trumpet at the Royal Welsh College Of Music And Drama bring a tangible hard-bop element to them, whilst a love of Madlib and J Dilla colours her joyous approach to production. Thackray’s also spo...
Clash Magazine •

Another Affair: Piercing Jockstrap's Harmonic Core | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

London outfit Jockstrap are one of the most exciting propositions in British music today.
On 2018’s stellar ‘Love is the Key to the City’ EP, they established themselves as electronic enfants terribles, juxtaposing several seemingly disparate elements in perfect harmony. This month, the band release their second EP, ‘Wicked CIty’, through Warp. 
At the core of Jockstrap is the duo of Georgia Ellery, who is also in Black Country, New Road, and Taylor Skye, who is an acclaimed young producer in hi...
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