Alpha Maid - Is this a queue (2025)

A growling, distinctive set of loose-limbed, groove-fwd and hooky art rock inversions, Alpha Maid's debut album augments post-punk, noise rock and free improv with sui generis studio fog and an unparalleled level of no-fucks-given eccentricity. RIYL Mica Levi, Dome, Moin, Loop, Still House Plants and features contributions from Ben Vince, Coby Sey, Valentina Magaletti and Leo Hermitt.

Leisha Thomas has been working almost entirely without fanfare, imagining a sound that's part Black Dice, part Slint and part Klein. 2021's 'CHUCKLE', felt sketchy, anarchic and unhinged - at the time, we compared it with Dean Blunt, This Heat, La Timpa and Slint - and 'Is this a queue' plays to Thomas's keenest instincts, darkening idiosyncratic pencil strokes with confident, intentional gestures. In a year where seemingly everyone's attempting the rock-pop pivot, Thomas refines and focuses ideas that have coursed through not just their solo work, but their spresso-branded collaborations with Mica Levi, for years. This is Thomas's record, for sure, and its quirks are only strengthened by collaborations with their wider community of like-minded operatives: Ben Vince, Coby Sey, Valentina Magaletti and Leo Hermitt. Nothing feels rattled off for clout - if there's an artist featured, you'd better know there's a damn good reason.

Opener '6-9' is irresistibly incongruous, a cheeky false start that de-platforms Thomas's signature guitar sound, fudging crusty environmental recordings and weightless drones into a modish take on Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis's subterranean rhythmic experiments. We're on more familiar territory with '2 Numbers', but what starts as a slowcore slog is coolly stirred by background whispers and plasticky stabs that sound as if they've been wrenched from Kelis's Neptunes-produced first LP. Even when Thomas forms what might be mistaken for a song, it's inevitably deconstructed or skewered; on 'Guarded', their wailed ad libs and chants drift in-and-out of step with grumbly strums and boxy, staggered drums.

"It's been a minute," they echo thru distortion and a heaping spoonful of reverb. And by 'GOAT Rosetta' there's almost nothing left but feedback and barely discernible words sung into the cavernous expanse. 'WHY WE HAVE TO MOVE' centres Valentina Mageletti's most Danny Taylor turn behind the kit, sounding as if it's about to fray at the edges, with its lysergic, xenharmonic guitar whirrs swamping Thomas's mumbled words and angular improvisations. They melt 'Washing Machine'-era Sonic Youth strums and boss-tuned twangs with similarly skewed AutoTuned moans on the simmering, brilliant 'On Smoke', and on the album's sobering finale 'Palimpsest', Thomas's purposed splatter of guitar noises and lurching beats fall into step with Coby Sey's alert annunciations and Ben Vince's inventive sax drones, forming a ruff outline of London's most fertile nook.

If you've been as bored by this year's "experimental" rock offerings as we have, let 'Is this a queue' restore your faith - it's really good.