Five Favourites: Clara Mann

Having charmed our ears last year with the sparkling emotion-strewn sounds of single ‘Stadiums’, and having previously shared stages with the likes of Bat For Lashes and Bill Ryder-Jones, London-based artist Clara Mann has now announced the release of her debut album, Rift, next month. A poignant exploration of the space between the light and dark, it offers a heartfelt ode to hope; an exquisite rumination that ripples with the stirring grace of Mann’s evocative vocals, alongside twinkling folk-strewn melodies.

We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspires them. So, ahead of the release of Rift, we caught up with Clara to find out about the five albums that have inspired her the most. Read about her five favourites, pre-order the album, and watch the beautiful new video for latest single ‘Doubled Over‘ below:

Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years
Some of the best songwriting in the history of ever. One of those writers who makes me pause the track to think “HOW did he do that?” My mum used to play this album in the car on the way to the dentist/big supermarket when we were children, so it’s special to me; and maybe I’m biased, but I think it’s magic. The actual title track makes me cry every time. Paul Simon’s particularly good at metaphor, if I’m being dry about it, but it never feels contrived, just true and poignant.

Mary Margaret O’Hara – Miss America
Mary Margaret O’Hara is my heroine – I love the balance she finds between the strange, the playful, the painful…. Her voice is so clear and true, and her (rather rare) performances that I’ve dug up from YouTube are highly charged; almost difficult to watch, they’re so intense. It’s almost like performance art, but less self-aware than that implies. This is the only full length album she ever recorded, and I’m so glad we have it. 

Blake Mills – Heigh Ho
I remember where I was when I first heard this record; I remember how much it affected me. Again, it’s full of humour, as well as pain, and the production is almost cinematic. Though maybe that word makes it sound less subtle than it is – I just mean it paints colours. 

Les Filles de Illighadad – Les Filles De Illighadad
In the village where I grew up in the south of France, there was a yearly culture festival celebrating North African and Saharan music, literature, and art. I guess it was a celebration of the immigration from Morocco and Algeria, a way of welcoming people and making a start on mending the fraught relations between France and that part of Africa. The village was suddenly full of exhibitions, market stalls and instruments that I’d never seen before, all brought by musicians and artists representing their regions. I remember, as a child, being particularly struck by the indigo robes that the Tuareg people wore – I thought the colour was so beautiful and so striking as they walked around the centre-ville. Even then, I think I was aware that I was lucky to be being exposed to the music they brought with them, music so different to what I heard at home. Fatou Seidi Ghali, the guitarist in Les Filles De Illighadad, is the first female Tuareg guitarist. But, apart from anything else, the music is just so extraordinary, and so feeling, and I listen to this record all the time. I love the agility of her playing and of the voices – it’s magic, and it reminds me of the village in the summer, and the blue robes.

Iris DeMent – My Life
A country classic. Another amazing female voice. Country music is profound and also profoundly silly, sometimes you can hear the laughter in her singing. Iris DeMent is so good at telling stories; stories of home, love, death, landscape… She breaks my heart again and again.

Huge thanks to Clara for sharing her ‘Five Favourites’ us! Watch the beautiful new video for her evocative latest single ‘Doubled Over’ below:


Rift, the upcoming debut album from Clara Mann, is set for release on 7th March via state51. Pre-order here.

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Five Favourites: Sophie Jamieson

Having received acclaim from the likes of Brooklyn Vegan, The Line Of Best Fit and Under The Radar, London-based artist Sophie Jamieson has now shared her exquisite second album, I still want to share, via Bella Union. Reflecting on themes of love and its many meanings, the album showcases Jamieson’s ability to create stirring celestial soundscapes with an added orchestral splendour. Rippling with the soaring raw emotion of her rich, resonant vocals, alongside an immersive shimmering musicality, it’s a beautifully heartfelt collection.

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspires them. So, following the release of I still want to share, we caught up with Sophie to find out about the five albums that inspired the writing of the new album the most. Read about her five favourites, listen to the album, get tickets to see her live and watch the beautiful new video for ‘I don’t know what to save‘ below.

Anna B Savage – in|FLUX
It’s hard to overstate the impact this album and this artist have had on me. Sometimes you hear a voice or a song that sounds familiar in a bodily way, but that also opens a door into more daring territory. Everything Anna does feels so… physical. Tangible, clutchable. There’s so much life bubbling through this record, so many sounds, such a sense of play, but with direction, earnestness, confidence, heart. It came out just after we’d begun recording. Something about its attitude crept into ideas I brought into the studio. One day we were working on ‘Baby’ – I said to Guy, I want some weird, bending sound here. Something loose – I found myself playing him ‘Crown Shyness’ which has this roar bubbling away through it, unsettling you. Inspired by that we detuned the guitar from note to note with some effects to create a similar sense of elasticity. We actually managed to put some kind of bending note into almost every song. I think a lot of Anna also crept into ‘How do you want to be loved?’ The moments of strangeness and grittiness amongst warmth and rich melody in this record played a big part in what I felt able to want from my own music.

Angel Olsen – Big Time
I’ve hammered this album pretty hard. It’s definitely one of my favourites of all time. I’m finding it hard to pin a finger on what has been most inspirational, because my album was written over four years and recorded over one. I’ve taken in a LOT of music over that time. But looking back, this record sank deep into my consciousness about six months before I went into the studio. The simplicity, the imperfections, the space. It’s epic, and intimate, also light, full of love, and full of tears. Angel sounds like she’s crying most of the time. I think the albums I love and learn from span the full breadth of the human heart and capacity within whatever they are exploring. That means touching upon highs as well as lows, and leaving space for hope. There’s a drum part I find sooooo satisfying and bouncy in ‘All The Good Times’ and I think that might have crept into the drums for ‘I don’t know what to save’. This record set a beautiful example for me that songwriting doesn’t have to reinvent any wheels or say anything other than what is. It also showed me the power of what a voice can do, when you let it come out as raw as this.

Daughter – Stereo Mind Game
A theme is emerging – the albums that came out during recording time couldn’t avoid coming into the studio with me. I’ve been a huge Daughter fan as long as they’ve been going. Elena’s understated vocals and gut-punch lyrics have driven me since my earliest songs. I couldn’t say what exactly fed into my album from this one but I know it’s there. This is a perfect record. I believe Elena worked almost obsessively on it for years, and scrapped some or all of it and started again… Perhaps just knowing that I feel deep love and appreciation for the level of attention to detail, the crafting of energy, push, drive, space. I think Daughter have always tickled the part of me that wants to be overwhelmed by music, and overwhelm a listener myself. If I had to find a detail that inspired me, it would be a part of ‘Dandelion’ where there’s another bendy note (!) which is a guitar in reverse reverb with loads of gain I think, it sounds like a revving engine. I was obsessed with it. I think it fed into a sound in ‘Welcome’ that revs up an octave between the verses. 

Hannah Cohen – Pleasure Boy 
This is the odd one out choice for me. My only one here not released in 2023 (it’s from 2015), Hannah’s 3rd album, Welcome Home is actually in probably my top three albums of all time. Though I wouldn’t quote its influence here as much as this one. I don’t find myself listening to this album much because it feels lonely, and I guess it reminds me of a particularly painful time I was going through when it was released. But I brought this record into the studio as a reference, because there is a spikiness and a fragility about it, as well as a hard kind of strength. It’s a contradictory combination that I guess I recognise in myself. It’s also just full of what feels like unrequited longing. I think it’s stayed with me, quietly, over the years, in my bones somewhere. I’m listening to it now, and it actually hurts. Like when you stick a finger somewhere really tender. I guess that’s what I’d love to do with my music.

Feist – Multitudes 
This was released around halfway through recording, shortly after I broke up with the person who has loved me best in my life, which plays out in ‘Your love is a mirror’ and ‘I’d take you’. This record really made me look at myself. I’m not sure why. There’s a line in ‘Hiding Out In The Open’ which echoed the song I’d already written: “the mirror in another’s eyes / that’ll get you every time / there are a thousand different ways to hide”. I was absolutely grabbed by this song, and the other stripped back ones on the record (‘Redwing’, ‘Love Who We Are Meant To”) in which the arrangement is so intimate and touchable, the recording is so alive. It really raised the stakes for how close you could get to the listener’s ears, and with those uncomfortable truths. I think it fed into “I’d take you”, which I wrote and recorded at home over a weekend that summer. This album really feels like a reckoning with something foundational and elemental. It does that with very little and also a lot, the dynamic range is enormous, and the sense of space is constantly morphing and bewildering. I love that.


Huge thanks to Sophie for sharing her Five Favourites with us! Watch the beautiful video for ‘I don’t know what to save’ below.


I still want to share, the new album from Sophie Jamieson, is out now via Bella Union. To celebrate, catch Sophie live this month – all dates and tickets here.

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Five Favourites: Fightmilk


We make no secret of our super fandom of Fightmilk here at Get In Her Ears. We’ve been following them since they first played live for us back in 2018, and now – after having had the honour of them headlining many more of our gigs, and being obsessed with their albums Not With That Attitude and Contender, our fandom has only continued to grow with the recent release of their new album No Souvenirs. Reflecting on themes of getting older, particularly as a woman in music, the album exquisitely showcases Fightmilk’s ability to hone their sound, creating perfect punk-pop; angsty and uplifting in equal measure. Instantly catchy singalong anthems, combining the band’s trademark tongue-in-cheek wit with a swirling energy and gritty raw emotion. From fuzzy sentimentality to fierce tirades against patriarchal society, No Souvenirs is a perfect culmination of how Fightmilk have continued to refine their sound. With shades of noughties punk-pop, combined with an injection of fresh queer joy and raging emotion, it’s at once cathartic, validating and empowering. But, most importantly, fun. A sound that’s uniquely Fightmilk; truly distinctive in its colourful charisma, but consistently evolving into something more. 

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspires them. So, following the release of No Souvenirs, we caught up with Lily, Nick, Alex and Healey to find out about the five albums that inspired the writing of the new album the most. Read about their five favourites, listen to the No Souvenirs on repeat, get tickets to see them live and watch the wonderfully DIY new video for latest single ‘Yearning and Pining‘ below:

Band pick:

Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
We all collectively, coincidentally, fell back in love with this album HARD at around the same time. It’s such a perfect cocktail of anger, positivity, self-reflection and FUN. It’s obviously also catchy as hell. The timing of our obsession coincided with Lily sending us a demo of the song ‘No Souvenirs’, which we definitely made a conscious effort of melding into something that could sit alongside those J.E.W songs. By the time we’d recorded the title track, we even learned ‘A Praise Chorus’ for a couple of shows in 2023, though damned if we can remember how to play it now.

Lily:

Olivia Rodrigo – Sour / GUTS
My name is Lily and I’m a sucker for a Gen-Z Disney star. Olivia Rodrigo’s songwriting is phenomenal. She is so self-aware, so funny, and so brutally (ha) honest – a lot of comparable artists who write music on themes of anxiety and awkwardness feel focus-grouped to death by people who haven’t been teenagers for a long time, or they bottle a feeling at the last minute and turn it into self-deprecation, but her songs feel like they’ve come straight from her diary. Lines like “I hope you’re happy, but don’t be happier” are such an economical, Ronseal way of articulating such a big, messy feeling – it’s such a skill to reduce all those complex emotions into one line. It’s very much the Kirsty MacColl/Alanis Morrissette school of ‘stuff I wish I’d said’. Sour was my big album for No Souvenirs, but I’m so glad we got GUTS halfway through recording too. I wrote ‘Summer Bodies’ before I’d heard ‘Pretty Isn’t Pretty’, which is one of my favourite songs on GUTS, and felt so much that it was written with the same exhaustion. I felt very seen: “I could change up my body and change up my face/I could try every lipstick in every shade”. I also love that during a time where guitar music is incredibly uncool, Olivia Rodrigo has released two big grungy rock albums. We have so much in common…


Nick:

Press Club – Late Teens
I absolutely love everything about this album. The aggression, speed & ferocity of it; the blown out vocals and the sparing way it was recorded, which is really no frills and designed to capture the rawness of a live show (I read somewhere that Nat does her vocals in the booth DURING the instrument takes, which is insane to me), and of course Frank’s drumming, which is fast and nuanced without being overtly flashy. There’s always a danger in this genre that you’re going to over-complicate stuff and have one instrument’s role overshadow the others, but the balance is right on this, and it was a wake up call to keep things simple – both in terms of our individual roles, and production, with No Souvenirs.


Alex:

Eiko Ishibashi – Drive My Car (Original Soundtrack)
The words and music on No Souvenirs are as accurate as you can get to the constant screaming static in our heads, as the four of us left the lockdown era, and tried to remember how to exist in the world, let alone be a band again. In the face of that chaos, the delicate arrangements and kinetic calm of Eiko Ishibashi’s Drive My Car score were my actual soundtrack to the period – a 45 minute gap in time where I could shut out the outside world and pretend it wasn’t going to come roaring back at me once the album finished. If you can’t hear that influence on our record, fair enough! But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t find a way in there somewhere.


Healey:

Lucy Dacus – Home Video
The early summer of 2021 was a super strange time, we were coming out of lockdown and all COVID restrictions were being removed but everything still felt scary and weird. Like Lucy Dacus we’d just put out an album, but we had no way of touring it yet and had sat on the songs for longer than expected. I went for lots of contemplative walks by myself round Peckham and I’d mainly just listen to Home Video and voice note demos Lily had sent to the band group chat. I got obsessed with this one early demo called ‘Swimming Pool’ – it’s a quiet song with just an acoustic guitar and double tracked vocals. It’s sparse, vulnerable and reflective. It caused the same gut reaction I get when I listen to Dacus’ music, a homesick nostalgic pang mixed with a dose of teenage embarrassment. While the title and some of its lyrics have changed, the core emotion is still there and I think Home Video was a huge influence on letting that track gently build to an eruption of fireworks at the end.


Massive thanks to Lily, Nick, Alex and Healey for sharing their favourite album choices with us! Watch the gloriously DIY video for ‘Yearning and Pining’ here:


No Souvenirs, the new album from Fightmilk, is out now via Fika Recordings and INH Records. They’re currently out on tour – very limited tickets left, but you may be able to find some here.

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Five Favourites: Umarells

Having just shared their debut EP, One More Day, Manchester-based dream-pop group Umarells create lush, glistening soundscapes, fizzing with a rippling raw emotion. Combining elements of shoegaze, grunge and indie-pop, they offer heartfelt reflections on themes such as grief and failed relationships, each song offering their own unique sparkling musicality.

We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspires them. So, following the release of their debut EP, we caught up with Imogen, Josh, Ryan Sarah and Fuchsia to find out about the five albums that inspire them the most. Read about their five favourites, and watch the beautiful video for stirring single ‘June‘, below…

Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
I first heard Natalie of Weyes Blood’s gorgeous Carpenter-esque voice on Drugdealer’s 2016 album The End Of  Comedy. When Titanic Rising was released in 2019 it resonated as the theme of an era of my life. Blending ‘70s pop vocals with romantic space age synth cynicism I was hooked from my first listen and rushed to see the masterpiece live in Manchester venue Yes’ pink room. ‘Picture Me Better’ – a song written about the loss of a friend – perfectly encapsulates heart wrenching grief and the hope to hear the impossible “call from beyond”. A song that inspired me to pour my own grief into our song ‘One More Day’.

Burial – Untrue
I vividly remember the first time I stumbled upon this album while exploring a friend’s CD collection. It was a revelation – nothing I had ever heard compared to its dark, gritty sound, interwoven with ethereal melodies and harmony. So melancholic. I often listened to it on my bike rides home through the city centre at 5am, after finishing my shift at a nightclub; feeling as though I was the only soul awake in the world. It’s perfect for those late nights when you’re caught between the desire to drift off and the inability to do so. The sampling on this album is incredible; the original sources are so cleverly transformed that I found myself spending hours online trying to uncover their origins. It’s a remarkable masterclass in genre-bending and structure, carving out its own distinct niche within the electronic scene. Its sound remains refreshingly futuristic, even today.

Pixies – Doolittle 
All amazing tracks and completely seminal. I became obsessed with Pixies when I was fifteen, after loading up my mp3 player for a school trip to Sorrento. I’d heard that Nirvana’s loud-quiet-loud structures were ripping off Pixies, so I downloaded some songs from Limewire. Listening to them on a coach driving along the West coast of Italy really cemented the tracks for me and I was kind of blown away by it. The guitar work is just perfect to me – simple driving bass lines, and Joey’s surf inspired riffs and bends are just amazing. The range of sounds in Frank’s voice means the album never gets boring and it contrasts with Kim’s vocals so well. To top it off, ‘Gouge Away’ is just the best final track on an album for me.

The Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
My favourite album changes constantly, but if I had to choose one right now I’d pick Siamese Dream. My first introduction to Smashing Pumpkins was at about seven or eight years old hearing them on The Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’. A few years later when I hit my full-on emo phase I delved into their back catalogue and Siamese Dream was the album that stuck out to me. I’ve never got sick of listening to it. Billy and James’ guitar playing on this record is just insane to me. The dynamics of the album too are just so great, the fact you’ve got heavy songs like ‘Geek USA’ but the softer songs like ‘Luna’ and ‘Disarm’ but they work perfectly together when listening to the album in full. Billy’s lyrics as well – “Fool enough to almost be it, cool enough to not quite see it. Doomed.” on ‘Mayonaise’, incredible. Whenever I’m writing new music I find this is the album I reference the most.

Big Thief – Two Hands
This is such a beautiful album – the lyrics are so raw and heartfelt – it’s such incredible story telling. The album flows from really soft gentle tracks to heavy gritty ones so effortlessly, and everything about the way it’s recorded sounds so natural. It came out when I first got back into playing music after a really long break and I would just listen to it on repeat. The whole album reminds me of a time when I really started to feel comfortable with myself and listening to it still reminds me of that. Seeing them live at the Apollo last year was an awesome experience!

Huge thanks to Umarells for sharing their five favourites with us! Watch the beautiful new video for stirring single ‘June’ here:

One More Day, the debut album from Umarells, is out now via Fear Of Missing Out Records.

Photo Credit: Kitty Handley

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