Goat Girl - Goat Girl [2CD Album of the Year Edition] (2018)

Rough Trade Albums of the Year Exclusive: Udder Sounds - 6-track 12" EP + bonus CD

Across 19 tracks in just 40 minutes, Goat Girl’s self-titled debut creates a half-fantasy world out of a very dirty, ugly city reality. Goat Girl belong to a burgeoning, close-knit south London scene, born in venues like The Windmill in Brixton and including bands like Shame, Bat-Bike, Madonnatron, Horsey, Sorry, and many more. Goat Girl enlisted producer Dan Carey (The Kills, Bat For Lashes, Franz Ferdinand) to help them capture their vision, set a goal to write and record a piece of music in a day in effort to capture that raw first-creation moment, and chose to record to tape.

It’s a very English album - sharp-eyed observations like The Kinks, louche rage like The Slits - but it’s also full of swampy, swaggering guitars and singer Lottie’s filthy drawl. Each member brings a diverse range of influences and contributions, ranging from krautrock to bossa nova, jazz to blues. They resist being boxed in to an indie, guitar-based genre, and focused intensely on the layers and textures of each song as well as the different contexts they could sit within. The result, Goat Girl, succeeds in conjuring a complete world all unto itself, and is arranged in segments - divided by improvised interludes - that offer glimpses of an even stranger parallel universe.

All versions come with a 6 Track Bonus CD Udder Sounds.