Juicy 3

Three records, one soul, held at three distances. Sade's 1984 debut keeps the voice close and never lets it rise. Khruangbin and Leon Bridges send it out over pedal steel and leave it hanging in the heat. Four Tet, a producer who barely touched vocals, chops them into loops and builds a whole album on them.

London, 2002. Fremantle, 2025. Ibiza, 2011. Three records, each with a second name inside. One borrows the voice from 'Rescue Me'. One turns to the beat with a songwriter on three tracks. One has a singer who co-wrote half of it. Look past the cover.

Three records made on their own terms. One singer's first album under his own name. A front room in South London. A studio of their own in Washington.

New York, 1976. South London, 2021. Perth, 2015. Three first albums, made by people with no reason to expect anyone was listening. One was cut in a studio upstairs at Radio City Music Hall. One has a singer who decided she would not sing. One was built alone, before there was a band to play it. All three built a sound. One built a genre.

A dub producer who spent thirteen years making records with other people's names next to his, then made one with his own on the front; Brian Eno plays guitar on it. A duo who sent VHS tapes to fans and put up posters in four cities before admitting any of it was theirs. And a producer who began his third album the week his second came out and finished it five years later.

Three records that reward every play. A band who recorded from London to the banks of the Ganges and came back with their strongest sound in years. A band captured on their first afternoon together, before anyone realised what was upon them. And a duo who found out how much you can take away and made their best record.

Three records made inside eleven months of each other, in a manor house near Bath, a Brisbane warehouse and a studio in the Pentland Hills. A guitar band who came back sounding watched. A band who could play anything and chose pop. And two brothers running synths through tape until the seventies came out wrong.

A Manchester band locked out of their own career by a court order, and the label that went into the vault anyway. One of the songs on it runs nearly ten minutes. An Icelandic duo who toured their second album across four continents, then handed it to five other people. And two Viennese school friends, twenty years on, remastered for the label's fortieth.

Three records that take their time. A producer in Leeds who made his in 2006 and handed the tapes over twenty years later to be taken apart. This is the original. Two men who wrote synth-pop hits forty years ago and came back to cover other people's songs on the same machines. And three from Fremantle who spent eighteen months on their first record and have since become one.

Three records made by people who stopped waiting to be asked. A bass player who announced in 1991 what he'd make one day, then got to it at sixty-three. A singer who built his across London and São Paulo with thirty-odd session players, and whose band was finished by the time it arrived. And a drummer who started his on a laptop and finished it in a room full of Melbourne musicians.

Three British records, 1994 to 2021. Two were built out of other people's records. One dug soul out of tape hiss and dread in Bristol. One went hunting through car boot sales in Leeds and came back warmer than anyone expected. The third was built from scratch in a rented flat in London, opening with a spoken poem.

Three records that don't ask permission. A band from England finding out what happens when you stop holding back. An American record made in 1992 that still sounds like it wants to start a fight. And an Australian who, when a label asked him to modernise his sound, told them no and made this instead.

Three records made with machines, forty years apart. Manchester in 1983, when a band who'd lost their singer worked out that grief could dance. Two men in a room last year with no plan and no obligation to anyone. And a Sydney trio who made the record that sounds like the sun coming up over water.