A LARGE SHEET OF MUSCLE - CHINESE BENEFITS (2026)

Indomitable avant-GOAT, Louis Johnstone (Wanda Group, Henry Caravan, British Museum) is surprisingly calm and collected in his own skin, grafting a low-key noir, cinematic, and suggestively narrative-driven episode on Jordan’s Drowned By Locals label. (Hulubalang, Richie Culver, Chino Amobi).

After the fractious shocks of ‘Dracula Completo’ in ’24 with TTT, the lesser-spotted Essex-via-Hudds iconoclast unfurls something like a hypnagogic score to a magic realist Andrea Arnold flick that locates poetry in the prosaic. Typically exposed to an iPhone, the artist shuffles in 20 succinct steps of intrigue & stuff from thought broadcasting spoken word shrouded in noir drone murk on ‘Our Illustrious Police’, to fully blunted, sud-swirl end of glass woe on ‘HMRC Widow’.

For all intents and purposes he resembles a modern day Jandek on the knackered blooz of ‘A 2 YEAR OLD’, and Áine O’Dwyer’s afterhours organ recitals in his nod to Opal Tapes’ caretaker ‘STEPHEN BISHOP AND BLACK GOD’, yet still reserves the right to jangle nerves with tart shots of noise such as ‘TONGUES TO THE MIDDLE EAST’ or the bittersweet tactility of ‘THE WINDOW CLEANER’, and likewise soothe them with the outright elevation of his acoustic strums in ‘BIBLICAL TAX EVASION’.

But it’s most vital for those bits when it feels like you’re a fly on the wall, witness to his observations and genuine LOL bathos, as in ‘GAS EXPANDS AND REFORMATION CHAT’, where he gives a running commentary on Huddersfield’s dog deposits and his own need for "a poo", or on the quietly deadly croon of ‘PREGNANT IN WEATHER’.

Genius, obvously.