Stick In The Wheel (singer Nicola Kearey and guitarist/producer Ian Carter)’s third mixtape release explores lost civilisations, inertia, beats music, sludge, drone, glitch and city soundscapes, held together with ancient word-glue, repurposed to deliver vital, urgent messages for now.

Lead track “The Cuckoo” reimagines a pastoral folk song as a sub-heavy lament for a master criminal; “Wierds Broke It” is 90s grunge + autotune for a lost civilisation; “The Devil’s Nag” takes a midi file of a 17th century dance tune to make a 21st century one.

Kearey’s sung and spoken vocal improvisations glide through and over Carter’s no-holds-barred underground production, at once rough and smooth, harangues citizens through a barrage of encrusted city noise. It offers up a soundtrack against the wildness of the city, and acts to drown out the worst of what humans are up to, destroying themselves. An intense, sometimes bleak, but somehow still uplifting experience.

[push-split]

1. The Long Day
2. The Cuckoo
3. Holet
4. The Seafarer
5. Prsn
6. Stroud Green Sentinel
7. Carter's Peal
8. Ruins
9. Blind Beggar
10. Perpen
11. The Devil's Nag
12. Tottenham Hale Monolith
13. Wierds Broke It