New music round-up

Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 13 March 2020.

Steven Wilson’s new album The Future Bites is an exploration of how the human brain has evolved in the Internet era. As well as being Wilson’s sixth album, it’s also an online portal to a world of high-concept design for the ultra-modern consumer. The Future Bites places the listener in a world of 21st century addictions. It’s a place where experiments constantly take place into the affects of nascent technology on our lives. From out-of-control retail therapy, manipulative social media and the loss of individuality, The Future Bites is less a bleak vision of an approaching dystopia, more a curious reading of the here and now.

“Personal Shopper”, the first track taken from The Future Bites is online on all streaming platforms.

Circa Waves have released their fourth studio album Sad Happy, out now via Prolifica Inc / [PIAS]. An album of our times, Sad Happy is formed of two diametrically distinctive sides, of which the Happy side was released digitally earlier in the year. It now unites with Sad as one complete body of work as Sad Happy, united as a full physical & digital album release on CD and vinyl formats. Sad Happy was written and produced in full by Kieran Shudall, and mixed by Grammy winners Dan Grech-Marguerat and Matt Wiggins. The release comes a little under a year after 2019’s album, What’s It Like Over There?

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Italian Opera Gala celebrates the best of Italian opera. Italy is more than just the home of opera – Italy is opera and opera is Italy. In the 19th-century its greatest composers were at the height of their powers, composing music that had audiences singing in the streets. In these special performances, the stars of the European Opera circuit take stage with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to perform the music of drama, beauty and passion from Puccini’s La Bohème, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Luisa Miller, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and much more.

Event details: 25 – 28 March, Sydney Town Hall*
Tickets: from $49 (booking fee applies)
Phone bookings: 02 8215 4600
* Correct at date of writing. Check local guides for any changes

Flip Phone Fantasy is the new release for oddball icons Ocean Grove. In true Ocean Grove fashion the band remained as free and lawless as possible while birthing their second record, answering only to the truths of their famously-coined “Oddworld” while meticulously crafting every creative output themselves, from music production, to merch, to art.