Unsung Podcast

Dance pioneers Orbital are perhaps more influential than you might think. Yes, they’ve headlined Glasto, and yes they’re practically household names to anyone who enjoyed getting a bit squiffy in a warehouse in the 90s, but they never really reached the same popularity as many of their peers. And it appears they liked it that way. Which is fine! This week Weaver brings their fifth album The Middle...

The time has come to talk about three albums that we think are good Britpop albums. If you could even call some of them Britpop albums… Chris chose ‘I Should Coco’ by Supergrass, which is definitely a Britpop album. Mark chose ‘Everything Must Go’ by Manic Street Preachers, which is not a Britpop album, but is often considered one, and is even categorised as one in wikipedia. Weaver chose ‘Blur’ b...

So, Britpop eh? To say that each of us approached this mixtape with trepidation would be an understatement equal in size to how badly the British government fucked up Brexit. That is to say, the fear was big, ugly and all too real. Which is mostly understandable on Chris’ part as he experienced it first hand. Mark and Weaver were still aged in the single digits when the whole sorry mess began. Yet...

The Melvins have a ton of back catagloue, and in our effort to reduce episode run times this year, we’ve tackled it with an unusual amount of brevity. In places. Not every place. But some places. But that’s easy because some people, including our resident fan of the band Chris, think that they’re a band that has struggled to stay consistent for entire albums. Which, when you realise they’ve releas...

Oh lawd, we ain’t messing around this year. Without Flying Lotus, the much vaunted Brainfeeder jazz/hip hop/electronica scene that gave rise to Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington and Anderson .Paak, wouldn’t exist. Although those guys had all been in each other’s orbits for a while, it took FlyLo’s record label to really bring attention to all of the good shit that was coming out of LA...

Even though we said last week that our resolution was to keep our episodes to around an hour, it turns out we’re big fat liars. We’ve busted that promise. We didn’t even last one episode. However, this week we’re talking about Kate Bush frankly, we just don’t think it’s possible to do her oeuvre justice in less than an hour. So there. After the roaring success of our Deftones episode (seriously -...

We deliberately didn’t tell you what we were doing next so that you would be somewhat surprised. This week, we’re rolling out one of our big guns. A critically acclaimed, influential, multi-million record selling big band of big dudes. It’s the Deftones’ fourth album, and it’s self titled. This episode is probably the biggest single episode we’ve yet done, but it works. We do an entire career retr...

It’s 2020. And the world has not yet ended. It’s something of a miracle. What is not a miracle, and is frankly a bit tedious if you’ve been somewhat alienated by our previous two episodes, is that our Xmas special is STILL not over. Well, after today it’s over, but it’s annoying that we’re dropping part three damn near two weeks after Christmas. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This whole sorry...

Look, Christmas is a time for giving. And also for drinking. And also also for airing semi-coherent nonsensical opinions. On this episode we some how many to cover all three. No more phone calls from Mark’s dad though. So that’s a thing. We take some more questions, go on some tangents, and then we resurrect Sound as a Pound (we will make this a regular mini-episode at some point in 2020, promise)...

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, apparently. As is now tradition we get a drunk, mouthy and a bit fighty. 2019 has been quite the year, so like last year we go through our usual list of questions. Some that we’ve dreamed up, and some that our fans have sent our way. As every year, this is split into two episodes. One drunker than the last. This year’s honour for the drunkest goes ti Mark,...

So folks, it all comes down to this. We’ve discussed the ins and outs of the genre. Given you the history from its pre-punk roots all the way right up to the present day. With all that history, all those artists, all those albums, we try to boil it down to the three best examples of the genre in our eyes. Chris picks Ixnay on the Hombre by The Offspring. Weaver picks Pump up the Valuum by NOFX. Ma...

Oh dip, it’s part two of our three part Pop Punk mixtape extravaganza. On this episode we move from the late 90s to the present day and wonder if people actually like pop punk after the mid 00s. The answer to that depends on how much you like fringes, whether or not you’re English, and if your favourite band is Blink 182, New Found Glory or All Time bloody Low. Weaver takes us from 98 to mid 00s,...

All three of us has done a fair amount of reliving our youth on this podcast, and after Chris had his Grunge mixtape and Weaver had his Nu Metal mixtape, it’s Mark’s turn to do the Pop Punk mixtape. So on November 24th a bunch of folks joined us in Glasgow’s The Flying Duck as we celebrated our 100th goddamn episode with this pop punk nonsense. It turns out this is a three parter, so in the first...

You 90s kids probably heard Cable in a Sprite advert. They weren’t particularly fond of their decision to make this move, in retrospect. Which kinda sums up a lot of this band’s story; screwed over by the mechanations of an industry that they thought would help them achieve at least some semblance of success. But when you think about it, given how obtuse a lot of this band’s music is, the fact the...

Chris was ill this week so we were unable to record. As a result, we thought we'd share with you an episode that, until now, was for subscribers only. This is the first episode of our subscriber’s only series called the Unsung Split 7”. As this is our first episode, we decided that we would pick an album by a band we’ve previously nominated that’s actually terrible. The hope is that after this you...

It’s hard to see a picture of billy woods’ face. At least, it’s hard to see an “official” one as it’s often censored. It might seem like an odd thing to start with, but we bring it up because his music is so identifiable, so recognisable that it really doesn’t matter if you know what the guy looks like or not; the art speaks for itself. Yes, that is Robert Mugabe on the cover. And the text is star...

If you’re not too young, and it’s not too painful, cast your mind back to 2003. The studded belts. The big fringes. The eyeliner. The teen angst. The legions of identikit metalcore bands. It was a different time. It can also be viewed as a most regrettable time. For fashion. For music. For everything, really. The Bled were a little known band from this period who seemed to unleash this album onto...

True to type we return to moody, melancholic indie this week. Only this time it’s a little more diverse, as Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album ‘Remind Me Tomorrow’ augment her usual folk-ish indie rock sound with everything from trip-hop to 80s synth pop. This album was released in 2019, which makes it the newest record to be nominated for our discography. Whilst it is a pretty good record, some of ou...

Hoo boy. This week’s episode is tasty. Some more savvy internet users may vaguely recognise the song ‘Plastic Love’ by Mariya Takeuchi. It’s a song that literally millions of people have heard due to the vast amount of memes that popped up in 2017 after a YouTube user used the the song in one of their videos . Apparently though, that’s not what led Weaver into the arms of the strange 80s J-Pop gen...

What’s not to love about three white men prattling on about sad indie music? Wait, didn’t we just do that? Well, we’re at it again. Sorta. Elliott Smith is more singer songwriter/college rock/alt rock but he’s by far and away sadder than Interpol. Which seems to be our MO for the past month. Look, we’re not necessarily saying that Figure 8 is his best album (but it might be), but we’re definitely...

If there’s one thing you can rely on when it comes to alternative music podcasts is that at some point they will inevitably cover Interpol. There will be some (usually straight, white) men in a room somewhere, huddled round their microphones, discussing the clever intricacies of their music, waxing lyrical about their coolness, and producing a well rounded chat on their influential status. We do s...

You can find part one here:  https://www.unsungpod.net/episodes/episode-92-somewhere-along-the-highway-by-cult-of-luna-part-1 Now it’s time for part two. After some lively discussion about their discography we pick things up as Chris talks about how fans generally rank their records, which then moves on to talk about the band’s status within metal music today. Weaver also talks about why he loves...

Hey, look guys, sometimes we can be relevant to current musical trends! If those trends are simply the result of us covering bands who have just released new albums… This week we cover one of Dave’s all time top 3 favourite bands, a band he reckons haven’t produced a bad record. A band called Cult of Luna. Amongst the die hards, the title of best Cult of Luna album swithers between this and Salvat...

Earnest, occasionally angry music by straight white men? Sounds like a punk band Mark likes. And so it is, as this week we talk about the gruffest men on earth, Hot Water Music. Ostensible a punk band, their throaty yelling and cathartic choruses have had a huge influence on so many punk bands over the course of the past 15 years. Alternately called things like gruff punk, or beard core, or even g...

The Knife are perhaps one of the most political bands we’ve yet covered on this show. Fiercely independent into the bargain, they’re probably one of the most punk bands we’ve had on this show too. Except they’re not a punk band. They’re anything but. As an electro-pop band, their early stuff was a cool juxtaposition between breezy dancable pop tunes and a strange, subtle darkness. Sometimes both c...