Ones To Watch: February 18

TMN’s charts team predict the hottest new music breaking over the next quarter.From emerging acts to established artists, we’ll give you our industry tips, based onforthcoming album releases, past performance, inside info and a myriad of charts data.

Violent Soho
Waco
(I OH YOU/MUSHROOM) Out March 18)

Mansfield’s finest, Violent Soho, recently announced the name and release date of their forthcoming hotly anticipated fourth album, Waco, out March 18.

The band broke into the Australian alternative scene in 2013 with critically acclaimed third album Covered In Chrome, which peaked at #6 on the ARIA Albums chart and has a Gold certification to its name.

The album seesBryce Moorhead atthe helm of production helm, just as they did with Hungry Ghost, spending the past eight months labouring away in the studio. Already the record isshowing signs of it exceeding Hungry Ghost in success.

First single Like Soda was premiered on Noisey’s US site and trended on Facebook for over fifty hours. The single, which now has just under a million streams on Spotify, was accompanied by a sold out tour. Track Viceroy released just last week premiered on triple j’s and is a fully-fledged grunge anthem. Filled with pummeling riffs and Luke Boerdam’s signature drawn out shrieks, which littered many of the hits on Hungry Ghost.

The past two years has seen Violent Soho become a staple of the Australian alternative music festival circuit, the most recent being St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival and the forthcoming Mountain Sounds festival.

With the group well and truly on the radar of every alternative music fan in Australia – so much so that there are fans haveeven created their own DIY posters to help promote the album – Waco is set to make history for the Mansfield act.

PJ Harvey
The Hope Six Demolition Project
(ISLAU/UMA)

Polly Jean Harvey returns to the music arena with her ninth studio album and first in five years, The Hope Six Demolition Project. The album itself was recorded in front of a live audience as part of a London museum exhibition in a custom-built recording studio in London’s Summerset House.

The Hope Six Demolition Project sees the alternative singer-songwriter/poet-storyteller indulge in politically charged lyrics, much like her previous album Let England Shake (2011) one that received a 10/10 review from NME and was described by the magazine as “a record that ventures deep into the heart of darkness of war itself and it’s resonance throughout England’s past, present and future”.

A longtime indie rock music veteran, PJ Harvey has been telling stories since the late ’80s, receiving international critical acclaim. She was named Songwriter of The Year and Best Female Artist by Rolling Stone on numerous occasions. When she released Sheela-Na-Gig, an albumrecorded with her early ’90s band The PJ Harvey Trio, the record was cited by Kurt Cobain as his 16^th favourite album ever.

More recently PJ Harvey has performed with the likes of Thom York (Radiohead), Josh Klinghoffer (Red Hot Chilli Peppers) and Morrissey, not to mention a long list of collaborators throughout her career including Nick Cave, Marianne Faithful, Bob Dylan and long time friend and producer Mick ‘Flood’ Elis, who produced The Hope Six Demolition Project.

Drawing influences from her travelsand taking herself on a unique artistic journey, Harvey travelled to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington D.C. to create the record. The first single off the album is The Wheel, which features saxophones, an autoharp and a bouzouki layered with a shoe-gaze fuzz and catchy melodies. A hell of a taste of what is expected for The Hope Six Demolition Project.