The Drift: the month’s best in weird and experimental music - Bumper Edition

Our first look at the world’s best new weird releases from the month of May

For Breakfast

This month’s Drift – the fifteenth edition, if you can believe that, has a fantastic array of experimental springtime sounds, for you to will the Solstice in with. Old faces and new are here to see in Gemini season, and once more we are faced with an overwhelming and unnavigable amount of vital new music.

Oftentimes, the new releases slow down as summer approaches, but not this month – it’s a bumper Drift today. I have so many new releases to share with you all, all weird and Drift-worthy in their own way. So without further ado, this is this month’s Spygate Spring Special Drift, giving you all the intel you could possibly need on the world’s weird, experimental and underground music.

---

For Breakfast – Longer Than Spring

For Breakfast took their time to get to their debut album, but, of course, friends, all the best things in life are worth waiting for. With two EPs, Songs in the Key of O (2020) and Songs from the Big Room (2022), the band made something of a splash in London’s alternative scenes at the start of the decade. However, with nothing released for four years, I feared we might have heard the last from them.

Longer Than Spring joyfully allays these fears. A pastoral patchwork of discreet folksy flutes and strings, and spidery post-post-hardcore guitars, adorned with Maya Harrison’s elven powerhouse vocals, For Breakfast are on another level.

All 7 tracks here are essential, but the chamber-rock sprawl of ‘The Moon and the Canyon Guide’ is one of the best musical moments of the year; a breathtaking melodrama. A knotty tangle of arpeggiated guitars and free-flowing brass lines, it ebbs and flows for eight minutes of sheer bliss.

One of the year’s best debuts, Longer Than Spring is a maximalist slice of delicate folk-inflected post-rock; an album for every season.