Rambling Fox

July 2026 Music Round-Up

Art by Sancoon

It's a new month and it's a new set of off-the-cuff word salad about what's been happening in my musical adventures across the month.

New Music Immediate Impressions

A fair bit of new music this month!

Acloudyskye - In a While This Will All Be Gone

Sometimes I am fully deluded in thinking that I have a vague awareness of what's happening in the grand world of furry music, and then reality slaps me and I realise how genuinely vast that world was. I bumped into Acloudyskye so randomly I don't even know how and I thought I had found my way to another obscure talent from the depths of Bandcamp, only to realise that they've got hundreds of ratings on RYM, with plenty of reviews and active shoutboxes to boot, even beyond just the furry audience. Wild! So I don't know anything about this act but I've really fallen for their latest album which came out last month. It's a really neat mix of influences from indie to dance, from contemporary pop to singer/songwriter, turned into this non-specific blend that really illustrates the 2020s. There's soaring soundscapes, sweeping emotional gestures, naked emotion and ambitious bombast, with some lovely songs to boot: I particularly love "To Tell You the Truth" which has that 80s-come-to-2000s power drama that e.g. The 1975 have been mining to their success but with an earnestness its big budget counterparts haven't reached, and the towering centrepiece "Tomorrow/Fish Storm" which moves from sound to sound and intimate to widescreen across its impressive 10 minutes. It's wild sometimes to think this is "just" bedroom musicianship. Really good, looking forward to catching up with the rest of the world as I check out more of their albums.

Bit Depth - Maybe in August

At the start of each year I inevitably bump into an album from the prior year that absolutely, positively should have made my end of year list if I had just been more timely. For 2024 that was Bit Depth's superlative Herdbound, so it's really exciting to jump into Maybe in August right from the start. This was released on the last day of July and I bought it early August so I've literally had a mere couple of days with this one, but early signs point positively. Bit Depth's sound is a really captivating mix of basement indie rock aesthetics with the ambitions and grandeur of a bombastic orchestral group. Maybe in August is a genuine musical dramatic flow of interlocking and segueing songs building into each other's crescendos: the individual moments are impressive (particularly the 10-minute early-album centerpiece "Weight", the slowly waking opener "This Phantom Tail" and the gorgeous fiddle-laden acoustic moment of calm "Maybe in August"), but all together they form an intricate journey. God, the furry scene really is such a gold vein running under the surface.

Fishboy - Bravest Neighbor

Fishboy's Eric Michener has made power pop opera concept albums his trademark and Bravest Neighbor is no exception, piecing together bit by bit the story of an imaginary neighbourhood and the relationships between its inhabitants through multiple points of view. What is new however is the rather more contemplative sound that Michener picks up on this album. You still have plenty of his usual exuberant energy, particularly in the singles, but wide stretches of the album are built upon slower paces, more vulnerable moods and delicate arrangements: even the classic Fishboy penultimate, story-tieing showstopper "The Bravest Girl Alive" moves on top of a slowly-building piano crescendo rather than going all-in from the get-go. Michener mentions in the bio that much of the album was composed in his head during walks around his home city, and throughout the record you can really get that vibe of walking alone through the streets as your thoughts stroll beside you. I think this is an album that's going to take a while to grow properly and I haven't had the chance to wade through it with the lyrics sheet in hand yet, to really absorb the narrative and the characters - the time for that will be when the CD arrives from the States. But I'm excited to dip into this deeper, because Michener's last couple of albums have been such wonderful journeys and this is already looking to be another success, now with a new sonic twist.

Madonna - Confessions II

I'm not clicking with this, sorry. Confessions II seems to have caused a wave of adoration, and I'm just not hearing it. This sounds like a quick olive branch/hopeful last shot at mass communication thrown at all the people who've been going non-stop for years that all they want is "Confessions II" - the fact that she actually named the album exactly that definitely adds to the vibe - i.e. just give us the easy bops for the clubs. The thing is, the very first Confessions on a Dancefloor was in itself a return to an easier, more digestible sound after the difficultly introverted American Life, but it still contained so much heart, cunning, wit and ingenuity in its dancefloor bangers - it's a triumph of an album. This sounds like a cookie cutter dance album with nothing that really makes it sound like Madonna; you can't really recognise her voice or songwriting because they're barely there to begin with, as the album keeps repeating the same beat and aesthetic over and over, one track to another. It sounds... cheap. I've tried but I just can't get anything out of this, a few songs sound a little better than others but even those are like pastiches rather than anything which genuinely would bring something new and exciting to Madonna's back catalogue. It's all just really drab.

Yard Act- You're Gonna Need a Little Music

The winners of the prestigious 2024 Flint AotY winners return and before the album, I was genuinely maybe a teensy bit concerned? The singles just didn't click with me and they sounded like a slight turn askew after the hungrily ambitious Where's My Utopia?. But the full album revealed an entirely different hand: another madly adventurous set of songs, but jumping into a rawer and sharper territory away, from the detailed arrangements of the previous album and focusing on harder-hitting turns. Yard Act have always been cheekily confrontational but here they're often acting like battering rams right in your face: the slowly unfurling brimstone of "Empty Pledges", the wink-and-nod indie disco "Cherophobe Rock" getting right up in your face, the constantly tightening wind-up of "Thrill of the Chase" until it explodes into a freak-out of sounds and, yes, even the stomping and clattering lead single "Redeemer" which hits a lot differently on the album. James Smith's off-the-cuff spoken word and dry melodies are both familiar and sleeker than ever, but there are parts of this album where his voice has evolved into a straight-up spitting rap flow and it fits the band like a glove. Yard Act continue to excite and amaze - I haven't been able to get enough of this album all month.

Hoard Updates

CD

Digital

This month's purchases are brought to you by ~The United States of America~. The albums from Sideswept Bangs, A Fox Named Coyote and Spring Silver were all purchases from Anthrocon, as I excitedly support furry musicians (and furry musicians who release CDs!!). I actually had a copy of the Sideswept Bangs album already from a few years back when they were handing out self-burned CD-Rs during my first AC, but couldn't resist the chance to snag one of the 'proper' prints and I've been returning to the album with twice as much love than I had before after witnessing the incredible performances S-Bangs had throughout AC.

And of course, while I was in the US I simply had to go to one of the local record shops to hunt down some North American releases that are harder to come by over this side of the pond. Attic Records has become my favourite spot near-ish AC and they didn't fail this time either, and I brought back with me a veritable bunch of goodies. The purchase with the biggest impact has surprisingly been the Uncle Tupelo compilation, which I bought solely as a curiosity - I love Wilco but never had much interest in the pre-Wilco alt country group, and I figured this'd be one of those shelf space hoggers that are simply "neat to have". Turns out, I've been hooked onto this compilation and I want to start hoarding the albums now.

I did also "grab" a few other things in July.

Namely, we finally 100% emptied my folks' house - our clan's (former) headquarters - in July, and during that purging process we had to choose what the last bit of things to save were. So, I grabbed the last few bits from my dad's music collection that I thought should live on with me. Danny was one of Finland's biggest popstars in the 60s and the 70s, and Rauli Badding Somerjoki is a similar local pop culture icon; both of those are multi-CD box sets covering their careers (in Badding's case, it's all his songs) and felt like too precious to depart from. The Badding box set was a bit of a cultural event when it appeared and I remember reading the booklet and fiddling with the box set when I was young, thinking it was something super fancy to have music packaged like that (it's just a longbox); both my sisters own their own copies, so now my dad's copy lives with me. The final album is the final piece of inherited Beatles I've taken with me - it's a set of live recordings from a TV special where a number of artists, both contemporary and veterans, covered a wide selection of Beatles songs.

Music reviews

Given I was travelling for half the month, there wasn't that much time to write reviews. Did manage to continue the RHCP discography run a little bit, and review a bit of random Finnish indie on the side.

Most played song of the month according to Last.FM

My top scrobbles are basically dominated by the Spring Silver and Sideswept Bangs albums, so I may as well pick my favourite song from the latter: "High Beams" really hit me during the AC live performances and it's now a firm favourite of the album.

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