From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like John Grant, Scott Walker, Father John Misty
Up next A cover of Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur is out now, with another single due in February
After several years of perseverance, things are happening for Storefront Church. The audience at this month’s sellout gig at St Pancras Old Church in London included Perfume Genius and members of the Last Dinner Party and the Horrors and their self-released second album, Ink & Oil, is picking up rave reviews. One used the term “emotional flood” to describe the album’s epic, baroque pop, big pianos and drums, sweeping choruses and Travis Warner’s lush, cinematic orchestrations.
Storefront Church is singer-songwriter/producer Lukas Frank and his various collaborators. The son of Scott Frank, director of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, he was a session drummer in his teens, touring with Portland rockers Portugal the Man and playing with Perfume Genius and his childhood friend Phoebe Bridgers before striking out to make his own music. His connections undoubtedly made this easier. His first album, 2021’s As We Pass, pulled Diiv guitarist Zachary Cole Smith into his melancholy, slowcore world; he and Bridgers also put out a mesmerising cover of Low’s Words in tribute to the band’s late Mimi Parker. But Frank has also put in the hard yards, working as a teacher and a waiter while making music.
Now 27, he has also dug deep emotionally to fire his hymnal songs, turbulent live performances and impassioned covers (including Roxy Music’s More Than This and the Sisters of Mercy’s Lucretia, My Reflection). A storefront church, incidentally, is “a place of worship, housed in a former shop or restaurant”, so it’s an appropriate moniker for the praise heading his way. Dave Simpson
This week’s best new tracks
Flowerovlove – Wishlist
The UK pop star channels Phil Spector’s girl groups, 80s festive chintzy synths with a vaporwave twist and Sabrina Carpenter’s cheekiness (“You know I’m teeny / Fit in your stocking”) on the best original Christmas song in recent memory. LS
The Null Club – Overgrown (ft Miss Grit)
Irish post-punks Gilla Band have always nodded to industrial techno. Now, their guitarist, Alan Duggan Borges, actively embraces it for this warehouse-rattling stomper. BBT
Laroie – Waterfall
The Canadian artist writes a love letter to the universe – but, she worries, does she deserve to have the universe love her back? This existential tussle is set to slow R&B that shifts like morning mist. BBT
George Riley – Drip
If pop success now generally comes after a few years’ toiling in the underground, then let 2026 be Riley’s year: Drip is cheeky, zippy and bassline-squelchy. LS
Anna Prior – True for You
The Metronomy drummer’s dreamy voice offers a forlorn contrast to the intensity of this heads-down club track, which runs on dark, ravey synths and anxious, intricate percussion. LS
Pulp – The Man Comes Around
An unlikely Johnny Cash cover by Pulp (from the soundtrack to ITV’s The Hack) works surprisingly well, reinvented as … chamber kraut-folk? With an unsurprising injection of lasciviousness from Jarv. LS
Natalie Wildgoose – In the North
Recorded on the piano in a rural Yorkshire chapel, and with a folk voice reminiscent of Sybille Baier, this track sees Wildgoose reflecting on the death of a loved one, their presence still tangible in the heather and deer of the moors. BBT
Subscribe to the Guardian’s rolling Add to Playlist selections on Spotify – or transfer it to Apple, Tidal or other services
