Welcome to Volume Ten in our mix show series of new music, latest release and soon-to-land gems, collectively known as Fresh Juice. This one takes in a mouth watering collection of up and coming sounds including Garage Rock, Soul, Heavy Psych, Power Pop, Indie Rock, Americana, Dark Folk, Folk, Jazz Rock and beyond so, as always, dig in and dig out. Full tracklisting below.
Tracks – Fruit Tree Records – Fresh Juice 2026 Vol. 10
Beth Orton’s new album is a stunning left‑turn from an artist who has spent three decades refusing to sit still. ‘The Ground Above’ demonstrates how she has moved beyond folktronica tags and past expectations to create something raw, spacious, and beautifully unguarded. The album is a suite of eight songs that feel more like living, breathing meditations than traditional structures. It is Orton at her most fearless: lucid‑dream songwriting, communal studio energy, and a voice carried by air, memory, and emotional truth. This is a recent live session of one of the records most gloriously uplifting numbers, ‘Waiting,’ and you can get the whole album here: https://amzn.to/4f6RbRE
The Junipers – When She Turns
This is a track from the Junipers scintillating latest album ‘The Solid And The Hollow.’ As ever, they lean into the vintage psych vocabulary without ever sounding like revivalists; this is awash with chiming guitars, drifting harmonies, and that unmistakable Junipers haze that turns a simple tune into something quietly transportive. This live film of ‘When She Turns’ catches the band at full radiance, bending time a little, opening a door to somewhere warmer, stranger, and beautifully their own. You can get the whole album here: https://amzn.to/4xUwlwo
Aaron Lee Tasjan – Science Friction
This is Aaron Lee Tasjan in full neon‑wired, art‑pop mischief mode; a taut, hook‑bright track that crackles with the restless intelligence running through his new era. Built on jittery rhythms and a sly melodic twist, the song feels like Tasjan peering at modern life through a warped magnifying glass. He is buzzing, slightly off‑kilter but as always irresistibly catchy. It is also one of the first signals of where new album ‘Get Over It, Underdog’ is heading. Tasjan has always been a shape‑shifter (glam troubadour, cosmic Americana poet, indie pop experimenter) but ‘Science Friction’ suggests a sharper, more playful futurism. The production is lean and alert, the vocals glide with his trademark wry charm, and the whole thing moves with the confidence of an artist who knows exactly how to bend his quirks into pop gold. You can get the whole album here: https://amzn.to/3SAyHQP
The Forty Fours – Now She’s Gone
This is the first proper glimpse of The Forty Fours, a London‑based trio stepping out on Blow Up Records with a debut single that feels both sharply defined and steeped in classic beat group aura. Cut as part of the label’s Blow Up 45 Series, the track arrives on a limited 7″ backed with a raw take on ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ signalling a band who understand the weight of tradition but are not remotely beholden to it. Recorded at Fish Factory in Willesden and finished at Soundbody Studios, the song captures the band’s tight, live‑wired chemistry; Oliver Harriss’s guitar and vocals out front, Jason Bazeley’s bass locking the pulse, and Andrew Stander’s drums giving everything a lean, propulsive edge. There is a vintage snap to the production from Roman Jugg and mixer Nick Terry, but the energy is direct, unfussy, and built to hit. With sixteen tracks already in the can and a debut album due later in 2026, ‘Now She’s Gone’ is a sharp, confident first strike from a band clearly ready for a bigger stage. You can buy the vinyl single via this link: https://www.blowup.co.uk/records/news/the-forty-fours-now-shes-gone-debut-vinyl-7-available-to-pre-order-now/
Nectar Woode (feat. Elton John) – Wine Into Water
I will admit I checked this one out because of the Elton John involvement, whilst his name cannot be called a guarantee of quality when he collaborates (let us not forget that he once worked with Blue) at least his interest in new music is sincere and his tastes are deep, so you never know. And that ear has served him well here because this is an emotive, soulful ballad that deserves the leg up Elton’s involvement will undoubtedly give it. His contribution is solely at the piano but that lush early seventies playing style of his turns out to be exactly the kind of organic bedrock this track needed. The song is due to appear on a forthcoming Nectar Woode album, ‘Naturally Mixtape,’ and you can find out more here: https://www.nectarwoo.de/
Raffy Bushman – Renaissance
This is the tune on which Raffy Bushman’s debut album really shows its pulse; that deep, unshakeable groove running through jazz from swing to Blue Note to hip‑hop, channelled into something sharp, modern and alive. The track opens with a spring‑loaded bass line before Bushman’s piano pushes it into a rolling rush of ideas, the trio moving with a looseness that still feels impeccably controlled. When the rhythm section drops out, he spins a mesh of looping, almost Bach‑like figures that play with time and tug the ear in multiple directions, before the band snaps back in for an exhilarating climb. It is Bushman at full clarity; complex yet immediate, rooted in tradition but lit up by his own instinct for forward motion. You can purchase the album here: https://amzn.to/4vAwWBI
Beth Orton first began to surface around thirty years ago, the charismatically detached voice that had featured a little on electronic dance tracks began to plough her own folktronica field with the release of debut album ‘Trailer Park.’ It was a graceful thing of acoustically decorated beauty, full of agelessly memorable songs instantly marking Beth out as an artist capable of pushing folk into bold new 21st century territories. I caught her live for the first time around then playing the Cambridge Folk Festival and it was immediately clear, observing the largely cross-legged crowd with the question “is it a folk thing?” that she did not belong in anyone’s club. As the subsequent albums and passing years have proved definitively, Orton is not in deference to a style aesthetic or servicing any musical eras and attitudes, she solely fuelling her art and the process of creativity. This, of course, has made Beth impossible to pigeonhole, it is a rare occurrence that a new album comes out from this writer that meets the pre-conceptions attached to it. If she were to ever produce a record worthy of the folktronica tag again, you can be certain it would arrive at the moment it was least expected. But the key detail to all the musical surfing Beth is free to explore is this, whenever she puts out new music it is always something worth digging into. Her peers and inspirations are not merely introspective singer-songwriters, instead she has the art project cache of a Tom Waits or David Byrne, forever tuned in and alert to the real-life stimulations and feelings that feed into her music, no matter what mode or texture the end product possesses.
That said, ‘The Ground Above’ dramatically stands out as a Beth Orton album like no other. If you are looking for that fanfare worthy lead track like ‘Stolen Car’ it is not here. Keeping an ear out for an americana inflected pot-boiler like ‘Concrete Sky’ will see you coming up short. For starters, the suite of eight songs is more like an ensemble creation than anything this artist has in her back catalogue. These pieces, especially at the front end of the record, are closer to meditations or celestial hymns than songs with locked in frameworks. That is not to say that they lack melody or even a rhythmical back bone, but there is a looseness to the vibes captured from these sessions that implies a group of musicians feeling and reacting as they recorded. A circle of trusted conspirators succeeded in turning the studio into a living organism, like a kind of communal breathing. Multi‑instrumentalists Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Beste (Vernon Spring) sketching out shifting emotional weather, drummers Chris Vatalaro and Tom Skinner pushing and pulling the momentum like tides, bassist Tom Herbert anchoring the undertow. Guitars from Dave Okumu, Grey McMurry, and Adrian Utley flicker in and out of frame, while Paul Butler’s presence lends a subtly glowing architecture. Within this constellation, Orton rises as producer, songwriter, singer, and bandleader with a clarity of intent. The music feels taller, more spacious even as Beth has learned to trust the air around and allow it to carry her voice towards a raw, open, vulnerable but honest place.
One of the most revealing insights Orton has offered ahead of this release is that all the songs “are looking through the prism of the years from many directions at once, I’m working with the unconscious, something like lucid dreaming.” This is overwhelmingly evoked during the eight minute plus title track, a piece in which Beth’s voice sounds absolutely choked amidst the stimuli and flashes of memory that engulf her. “Love is the only certainty there is” she sings, and in so doing she hits the mainline of lifeblood that is pulling her through. This music celebrates the kind of love that hits so hard it knocks us off course into new pastures, whilst never kidding itself that these lightning bolts are not closely accompanied by equal amounts of grief, hurt, and pain. As such it is the currency of universal truth Beth is dealing in here, “ecstatic as a mothers love, tearing through the sky to the ground above,” and these sonic landscapes absolutely burn thanks to the natural root ingredients. If it were not for the stuttering, trippy beats and waves of electronic ambience that bookend the piece, it could almost be described as free jazz and even though it is not that, there are enough sonic reference points throughout the album to make the connection. Each song progresses so satisfyingly that they surely were sequenced this way intentionally, a shining example of an album that needs playing in the correct running order. Without this, the joyous release felt on closer ‘Otherside’ would be lost, the sense of journey and passage nailed down as Beth sings of finally weeping while birdsong ushers in a new dawn. The sense of survival and desire to squeeze all the good out of life that we can lay our hands on is tangible here, on the other side of a night filled with the unsettling merging of thoughts and memories both lived and inexplicably inherited. It spins itself into a rousing finale that has our singer projecting out to the sky too, the crack in her voice now the product of strength rather than the punctures heard at the outset. After multiple plays, I am already recalibrating my Beth Orton chronology in readiness to acknowledge this as her greatest album. It clearly argues that she makes her best music not when shackled by the idea of recording a hit, but actually when free to paint the truest picture possible, from an unlimited musical palate, of the life and energy rotating all around her.
This week’s half dozen new music recommendations seems to have settled around a theme of historically much-loved artists stepping back into the spotlight. I think it was sometime around 1991 when I first read Michael Stipe in an interview talking about how he was planning a solo album. Now, fifteen years on from R.E.M.s split he is still building up to releasing that solo debut. This might suggest to some he is not too worried about it or, equally, may point to his compiling a work of such high quality that there is no intention of putting it out until it is perfect. Luckily, the evidence available on this new TV performance speaks to a slow paced creation being more likely thanks to the latter. There is still no release date available other than Michael’s prediction it would come out before the end of 2026 and sharing that he is now in the “final stages” of the recording and writing process.
Graham Coxon – Billy Says
When not tied up with Blur reunions Graham has spent a large part of his music life focusing on The Waeve with partner Rose in recent years. This forthcoming solo release does not indicate a shift back to working under his own name, it is actually from a previously unissued record recorded in 2011 and set for full release on 19 June, 2026; part of a comprehensive reissue of Coxon’s complete solo catalogue, spanning 9 studio albums and 3 original soundtracks, across the next 12 months. ‘Castle Park’ was recorded in 2011 as part of the ‘A+E’ (2012) sessions. Originally intended as a follow up to ‘A+E,’ the release was postponed due to Blur activity in 2012, before Coxon moved on to other projects. The album is a collection of 10 songs that lean into Graham’s classic mod sound, with lead single ‘Billy Says’ – a longtime feature of Coxon’s live set – already familiar to fans and now finally available for the first time. Get yourself on the pre-order list here: https://amzn.to/4eLro1H
Tift Merritt – Someone To Watch The Band With Me
Here is another falling firmly into the long overdue category. Back in the early years of the 21st century Tift was one of the most exhilarating, engaging and deliriously infectious performers on the Americana circuit. Then she put out world weary records like ‘Travelling Alone’ proving she was not limited to the rhythm and the sawdust but was also capable of writing in the country style with real emotional clout and authenticity. Put simply, she has long been one of the most dependably brilliant artists to come out of America in modern times and so with ‘Someone To Watch The Band With Me’ showing no loss of cutting edge, taken from the album ‘Sugar’ due out June 26th via One Riot Records, it already sounds like one of the releases of the summer is on the horizon. Pre-order here: https://amzn.to/4d8WNd6
Ringo Starr – Long Long Road
That Beatles magic still holds me under a spell in 2026, I make no apologies for that. Ringo Starr’s new album, from which this is the title track, is already out and it feeds into his long declared love of country music. I think the thing that I enjoy best is simply that this comes out because Ringo still has the hunger to make a great album. There is enough care and attention on display, an incredible array of modern Americana talent contributing and the whole affair is coated with that unmistakable Ringo, peace and love, personality that remains impossible to get cynical about. And for Beatles trainspotters this video, and indeed the album cover, has a real improbable gem of a detail. That purple ruffled shirt Ringo wears is the very same shirt that he is pictured wearing in the inner photos of ‘The White Album’ in 1968. This is a garment older than me that means. Altogether now, Ringo Starr is making Ringo sounding music and there are fresh Paul McCartney sounds just around the corner too. The dream may have been over yesterday, but with fading sunshine like this still pushing through the cracks in the concrete, perhaps there is something to be said for still treasuring a fantastic thing while we can. The album is available here: https://amzn.to/3R42ccT
Beth Orton – The Ground Above
This is the lead title track from a new album that is due to arrive in July. It should come as no surprise to anyone following Beth’s career over the past thirty years that she continues pushing boundaries with her sound and craft. From the beginning she was so much more than an acoustic troubadour, Beth was an alchemist fusing the rougher textures of organic sounds with forward reaching loops, electronics with an ear for the DJ wizardry of dance music. Beth has never been overly earnest or a muso and she instinctively avoids a comfort zone like the plague. And so it is right here, where we find her making music that is immediately of another plane. Not quite Scott Walker in the latter part of his career but this is a step towards it, the form is free and the singing a ghostly echo, the textures shift and it is hard to tell if we are moving towards a diffident dance motion or free jazz. But Beth always had soul too and in among the unsettling audio movements the human touch of her vulnerable voice cuts through. Should be an interesting album so get yourself a pre-order here: https://amzn.to/421arc7
Beck – Ride Lonesome
And so we wind things up this week with one more legend still proving they have the quality in their work to stay relevant. This is a taste of the mellow, introspective Beck that arguably has overshadowed his hip-hop tendencies this century, at least in terms of reception. Still, it is very exciting to hear that he can still do this so well and the man himself has described to DIY Magazine that it as the “first indication of a different yet familiar direction” for his music in the year ahead. The standalone new single is available via this link: https://amzn.to/4tBuOIU
Fruit Tree Records 