On This Track: Midweek Listening #6
- Raven
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Five new discoveries spanning indie dance, punk history, strange synths and folk.
Five releases, five very different ways of looking at music. This week's On This Track Midweek Listening 6 moves from Friendly Fires' first new music in seven years to Basement's hard-won return, then steps outside the usual song format with Naomi Petersen's newly announced photography book. From there, Studio G takes us somewhere considerably stranger before Steve & Ginie Jackson bring things back down to earth with a drunken walk home turned folk anthem.
Friendly Fires - “Lose All Your Friends”
There is something deliberately misleading about the title. “Lose All Your Friends” sounds like a song about isolation, but Friendly Fires are treating it more like an invitation to stop worrying about where you're supposed to be going. After seven years without new music, the British dance-punk band return with Ed Macfarlane and Edd Gibson now working as a two-piece. The change in lineup has also changed the way they record. Garage recordings, live drums and less polish have replaced some of the studio precision of their earlier work, giving the new track a looser, more human feel. The song itself feels like the moment when a night stops following a plan. There is a certain freedom in getting separated from everyone you came with, taking the wrong turn and discovering that you don't actually mind. The lyrics turn that feeling into something more deliberate: change might be uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean it is a mistake. “Lose All Your Friends” sounds like the sun coming up after a night that went somewhere unexpected. For a band returning after such a long absence, it is a fitting way to start again.
🎧 Stream “Lose All Your Friends” on Apple Music
Basement - “WIRED”
Basement have already proved that disappearing for a while doesn't necessarily make a band less relevant. Sometimes it does the opposite. The British alternative rock band returned with "WIRED", their first album in eight years and their first release through Run For Cover Records since their early days. The album is less interested in recreating what Basement were before their hiatus than in figuring out what they can still become. The title track is the clearest expression of that idea. Guitars keep needling forward while the drums give the song a heavy, physical momentum, and Andrew Fisher's vocals rise into a huge chorus. It is urgent without sounding rushed. What makes the song more interesting is everything that happened before it. During their years away, the band questioned whether they should continue at all. They eventually came back together without the label pressure that had surrounded their previous record and spent years writing and refining the material before recording it with producer John Congleton. There is no nostalgia in “WIRED”. Basement sound like a band that knows exactly how close they came to stopping and has decided to use that knowledge as fuel.
🎧 Stream “WIRED” on Apple Music
Naomi Petersen - Shot at the Speed of Sound
Not every musical discovery starts with a song. Sometimes it starts with a photograph. Naomi Petersen was just 18 when she became the house photographer for SST Records, placing her directly inside one of the most important periods in American punk and underground music. Over a 12-year career, she photographed artists including Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Fugazi and early Nirvana. Her photographs became part of the visual language of the scene: album covers, flyers, fanzines, promotional material and magazines preserved moments that otherwise would have disappeared with the shows themselves. Now, more than two decades after Petersen's death, her work is being collected in "Shot at the Speed of Sound: The Photography of Naomi Petersen" set for release on October 31, 2026, through Sumerian Publishing/Punk Life Naomi. The 152-page hardcover will be the first solo collection of her photography, bringing together images from her career documenting punk, hardcore, alternative rock and heavy metal. What makes the collection particularly compelling is that Petersen wasn't simply photographing a scene from the outside. She was young, deeply embedded in it and working at a time when music photography was overwhelmingly male. Her images preserve not only performances, but the people and spaces around them. Music history is often remembered through recordings. Petersen's photographs remind us that scenes also leave behind faces, rooms, clothes, gestures and moments that never made it onto a record.
📖 Discover "Shot at the Speed of Sound: The Photography of Naomi Petersen" at
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Studio G - Nature's World
Imagine a nature documentary soundtrack with no interest in behaving like one. That is roughly where Studio G's "Nature's World" takes you. Originally released in 1982, the collection was created for nature documentaries, using synthesizers to conjure birds, insects, underwater worlds, prehistoric caves, Arctic landscapes and volcanic eruptions. The strange thing is how easily the music escapes its original purpose. “Aquarium” drifts into an underwater haze. “Catacombs” sounds considerably darker. “Flower Garden” turns into a surprisingly infectious synth-funk groove. Even the short cues feel less like background music than tiny worlds of their own. Now "Nature's World" is returning to vinyl for the first time in more than 40 years through Jazz Dispensary. The reissue arrives October 16 on “Terratopia” splatter vinyl, continuing the label's exploration of Studio G's archive. There is something wonderfully odd about discovering a record like this in 2026. Library music was often designed to serve somebody else's image, but the best examples developed lives of their own. Studio G's music has been sampled and rediscovered by generations of producers and collectors, and "Nature's World" feels like exactly the kind of forgotten record that keeps revealing new details the longer you listen. It is atmospheric, playful and occasionally bizarre. In other words, it is much more interesting than a soundtrack about birds probably has any right to be.
🎧 Pre-order “Nature's World” (Vinyl) on Jazz Dispensary
Steve & Ginie Jackson - “Bloodshot Eyes”
“Bloodshot Eyes” starts with a story that sounds like it probably happened to somebody. The new single from Montreal folk trio Steve & Ginie Jackson turns the aftermath of an unforgettable drunken walk home into an upbeat folk song, complete with harmonies, a big sing-along chorus and enough energy to make the bad decisions sound almost worthwhile. That balance between storytelling and celebration is central to the band's sound. Steve Viau brings guitar and vocals, Virginie St-Louis Grégoire adds mandolin, melodica, ukulele and vocals, while bassist and backing vocalist Cédric Bérubé completes the trio. The band have been performing together in various forms since 2017 and have played more than 200 shows across nine countries. “Bloodshot Eyes” is the first taste of their upcoming album "Nothing Is Real", produced in collaboration with Pete Bernhard of The Devil Makes Three. The record is due January 1, 2027, but the single already gives a good sense of what to expect: folk music that doesn't take itself too seriously, even when the stories get messy. The timing also makes sense. Steve & Ginie Jackson are heading out on a European tour this week, with a Berlin date at Märkisches Ufer on September 4. Sometimes a good folk song doesn't need a complicated premise. You had a terrible night, you survived it, and now there's a chorus you can sing with your friends.
🎧 Stream “Bloodshot Eyes” on Apple Music
Five releases, five different ways of finding something worth hearing. Friendly Fires embrace the uncertainty of starting over, Basement turn a long absence into momentum, Naomi Petersen gives us another way to see punk history, Studio G proves that even forgotten library music can feel strangely alive decades later, and Steve & Ginie Jackson turn a questionable night into something worth singing about. That's what I like about Midweek Listening: the best discoveries don't always arrive in the same shape. Sometimes they're a new single. Sometimes they're a record from another era. And sometimes they're hiding in the photographs surrounding the music.
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