Francesco Amoroso per TRISTE©

Maud Anyways is the solo project of French musician Maud Platiau-Bourret. Impermanent Lane was out in 2023, on Brighton’s Shore Drive Records. Echoes of Encounters, her magnificent second album feels like a quiet conversation with your own mind: intimate, reflective, and slightly elusive. The album lingers on mood, letting subtle guitar textures and emotional nuance do the work. Its strength lies in how it captures fleeting moments and turns them into something gently resonant. It’s a record of modern shoegaze songs, that rewards unhurried listening, inviting you to sit with it and let the echoes unfold. Echoes of Encounters is a perfect mix of ringing guitars, deep bass and precise rhythms, with a dreamy floating vocal. With Maud Platiau-Bourret we went for a deeper journey -track by track- into the heart of Maud Anyways fantastic new album.

Francesco Amoroso per TRISTE©

Over the course of nearly forty years, Would-Be-Goods have occupied a space all their own in the history of British independent pop: lateral, coherent, and resistant to easy categorisation within any specific scene. Born in the late 1980s as a Jessica Griffin project, they emerged in the orbit of Mike Alway’s El Records with The Camera Loves Me (1988), an album that showcased an extraordinary songwriting voice, capable of portraying eccentric characters and oblique situations with a seemingly impassive tone and melodies of surprising elegance. Flanked by The Monochrome Set, Griffin immediately defined a distinctive aesthetic, destined to stand the test of time. Soon afterwards, however, she withdrew from the public scene to return to her work in the City, resurfacing only a few years later with Mondo (1993), which confirmed and expanded that universe, before Would-Be-Goods evolved, from 2000 onwards, into a fully-fledged band. With the addition of Peter Momtchilloff, Deborah Green, and Lupe Nuñez-Fernandez (later replaced by Andy Warren) the project assumed a new shape, giving rise to a series of EPs and the albums Brief Lives and The Morning After, culminating in 2008’s Eventyr. After a long silence and the unexpected release of The Night Life (2023), conceived in the midst of Covid and built around songs written and recorded in a single day, with Tears Before Bedtime, the band reaffirm their poetics of restraint, imagination, and attention to detail, far removed from the pressures of passing trends. A discreet yet tenacious journey, spanning decades without ever losing its identity. With Jessica Griffin, affable and elegant as ever, we went for a deeper journey -track by track- into the heart of Would-Be-Goods amazing new album.

Francesco Amoroso per TRISTE©

Over almost three decades of collaboration, Karl Smith and Pete Cohen have continued to move through the seasons of life with the same quiet grace that has always shaped their music. From their days as Sodastream -an emblem of intimate, melancholic acoustic pop- to the present, the duo has learned to balance family, work, and creative urgency without ever losing their instinct for honest songwriting. Returning now as Smith & Cohen, they offer Half Life: an album that feels like a patient reflection on time passing, on growing older, and on the fragile value of everyday things. Letting go of the Sodastream name was not a rupture but a natural evolution -an act of awareness by two musicians who have always dared to sing their truth. And while the hallmarks of their sound remain -the warm double bass, the understated guitar, the soft melancholy woven through every line- the music here breathes differently. It is more spacious, more open, shaped by fewer collaborators and by the silences and distances that life inevitably introduces.