The Courage of Others is an album that at one point Midlake feared they would never make. The follow-up to their 2006 second album The Trials of Van Occupanther – one of the last decade’s most surprising and utterly fantastic records – it took just over one year in total to complete (the same…

Of all the names being bandied around at the moment as ‘ones to watch’ for 2010, one that keeps cropping up is Two Door Cinema Club. Therefore State deemed it vital to meet up with the three band members for a chat a few hours before their debut headline gig in Dublin’s Crawdaddy venue…

Comedy and music are wonderful bedfellows – witness the zany, seminal humour of Monty Python’s songs or the off-the-wall ditties sung on The Mighty Boosh – and Flight of the Conchords are just the latest in a long line of comedic groups to dabble in music. After working together for more than a decade,…

When he was growing up, John Vanderslice wanted to be an English teacher. He pictured himself encouraging students to learn about the writers he loved while growing up– such as his heroes, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow and Anthony Burgess – and helping them delve into the fascinating world of literature as he had done.…

There is nothing like watching a live performance by a band that makes you want to dance. It’s a simple enough thing, and no doubt if you’re reading this you’ve been to plenty of gigs in your time. But the ones that stand out, are they the ones that made you want to move,…

Maybeshewill. Four syllables, three words mashed into one. Three Leicester lads, John Helps, Robin Southby and James Collins, making instrumental music of epic proportions – and they’re visiting our shores this weekend thanks to the good folk behind the Club AC30 nights. When State speaks to John Helps, the band are preparing for a…

“… spiritually, I feel like the story of Lucifer is still — “ Silence. Twenty five minutes into a phone interview with Berlin-based Arish ‘King’ Khan – voodoo-loving frontman of the Shrines, former member of the Spaceshits, founder of the Kukamonga Death Cult – and talk has turned to the devil. “I think rock…

It starts with a drone. A constant note, underpinning the irregular judder and shudder of drums, and the fizz of unexpected electrical sounds. It takes almost three minutes before the piano notes start to come together, before a fragment of a melody appears. It takes almost ten minutes before ‘Melankolia’, the opening track on…

You see them at every gig – they might be wearing a grubby pair of jeans, old Converse trainers and a stained tour t-shirt dating back to the 1980s; they’ll invariably be carting around amps and bass drums. If you’ve been to a gig just once in your life you’ll have noticed them: the…

Picture, if you will, a squinting young man. A light brown sweep of unbrushed hair flops over his right eye; on his lanky, 5’10 frame hangs a checked silk shirt, beneath which can be glimpsed a print bearing the pensive, black and white visages of four dour Mancunians. In his left hand he clutches…

Future Islands are a Baltimore-based synth-pop band that appear to revel in opposites: witness vocalist Sam Herring’s soaked-in-gin wails jostling with happy, bleeping synths. Or the over-the-top, psychedelic videos, where real-life slams into an imaginary dreamworld. In every beautiful moment, things are streaked with danger; during every quiet period there’s a frenzy waiting around…

You may not realise it, but you’ve probably heard a lot of Nico Muhly’s music over the past few years. Even if this prodigious young American’s name isn’t immediately familiar to you, you could have stumbled across his musical input on any number of projects. Perhaps you noticed the string arrangements on Grizzly Bear’s…

The joy of listening to any Fabric live mix is not knowing exactly what you’ll get – it’s a chance for producers or DJs to show off the depth of their influences as well as their skills on the decks, and sometimes it brings a few surprises. And for two of the more recent…

As a young boy growing up in a small American town, Arman Bohn entertained himself as countless kids have done over the last couple of decades – by playing video games. Fast-forward to 2007 and these fantastical characters, blood-strewn battles, and pixelated space-worlds provided him with the inspiration for his first solo album, Bits,…