“I’m irrelevant!” James Smith repeats at the climax of The Incident, midway through his band Yard Act’s debut album. In fact the Leeds frontman finds himself in the thick of a new wave of words-first post-punk bands that extends from the impassioned sloganeering of IDLES and brooding poetry of FontainesContinue Reading

The Russian-Ukrainian war began in 2014 after pro-European protesters toppled the government of the Moscow-backed president Victor Yanukovych. This led to a rapid escalation of a crisis that resulted in the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014 and the establishment of two Russian-protected de facto states in easternContinue Reading