10 underrated albums that will significantly improve your summer

Splash – ‘Money’

Release Date: September 1988 | Producer: Hamilton Nzimande | Label: Gallo GRC

Anyone who’s watched Nick Broomfield’s darkly funny The Leader, His Driver and the Driver‘s Wife documentary will remember the joyously infectious keyboard-driven township pop that scores the filmmaker’s travels across South Africa… Such sunny cheer is the work of Dan Tshanda’s Splash project, a shiny plume of synth and drum-machine mbaqanga post-disco impossible not to like and laying the foundations for the 1990s’ kwaito wave.

It is technically an EP, but 1988’s Money showcases the Splash sound firing on all cylinders. Giddy rhythms, bright production, and just the right amount of sonic chintz stand as a perfect introduction to the Soweto ensemble’s effervescent pop and a guarantee to complement the beaming weather’s sorely-needed spirit lift. You might wanna skip the syrupy ‘Praise the Lord’, however.

Chai – ‘Punk’

Release Date: February 2019 | Producer: Ryu Takahashi | Label: Otemoyan

A beaming burst of sugar-rushed, kawaii punk-pop radiates from every one of Chai’s second album. A dizzying blend of electronic bounce and dancefloor indie, Punk saw the Japanese quartet truly crack their bubblegum sound, careening around its hectic genre hodgepodge with all the hectic energy of the Nagoya city bustle, from which Mana, Kana, and Yuna hail.

It’s big, chunky and brimming with flavoursome charge. Just like the cartoon character that adorns its cover, Punk both honours the J-pop stylings while pushing the country’s premier genre to intrepid, alternative corners. You could plumb for any of Chai’s four LPs, but Punk seizes the happy spot of the brain with the most potency, and ‘This Is Chai’ is especially a perfect addition to the summer BBQ playlist.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux – ‘Zulu Rock’

Release Date: May 1984 | Producer: Adam Kidron and Michel Esteban | Label: ZE

Unfortunately, the sunshine zest bottled on Zulu Rock is tainted by its murky circumstances. Recorded largely in Johannesburg’s Satbel Studio, ZE Records’ Lizzy Mercier Descloux indeed broke the cultural boycott against South Africa’s Apartheid regime, as well as faced accusations of swiping existing mbaqanga pop tunes and refashioning them with French lyrics, which dogged the mutant disco pioneer’s third LP.

Whatever the substance of such allegations, and amid the overtly anti-racist themes of the record, Zulu Rock offers plenty of Xitsonga disco flair and colourful Shangaan party plumeage, fronted by Descloux’s jumping jack croon. It’s the French post-punk singer’s best LP, and wields a slice of teeming, myriad sunshine across every corner of its beckoning, worldbeat collage.

Tacocat – ‘This Mess Is a Place’

Release Date: May 2019 | Producer: Erik Blood | Label: Sub Pop

Perhaps a little removed from the music radar since their last album, but Tacocat were gifted with a dreamily contagious pop pen across their main 2010s output, packed with surfy twang and pixiestick indie that put a smile on the face. The Seattle quartet reached their hookiest and bubbliest on This Mess Is a Place, taking lyrical potshots at the world’s materialism, bleak news cycle, and nagging mental health plaguing via their beguiling pop facade.

Such themes have only amplified in the seven years since This Mess Is a Place. With the surrounding political failure threatening Mr Sun’s good cheer, Tacocat’s breezy arm around the shoulder is just the band you need after your doom scroll has threatened to spoil the summer party.

Prince Rama – ‘Xtreme Now’

Release Date: March 2016 | Producer: Alex Epton | Label: Carpark Records

There’s a heady brew of tangy genres swirling around any of Prince Rama’s albums. Laser clubland bristles against blustering psychedelic rock, marrying cabalistic mythos with futurist visions of tomorrow’s technoir, with the pair typically wielding a sword of some kind. It was all good, escapist fun, responsible for some of the most electrically dramatic pop of the decade before they wound down for good in 2019.

Xtreme Now is the sunshine album that deserves your attention when the skies are at their most cloudless. Kaleidoscopic shimmer and gleaming pop charged with almost gospel sermon energy, Prince Rama won’t just score your summer, but unveil another realm of spiritual fancy that will ensure, with total certitude, Xtreme Now’s heavy rotation for the upcoming months.

Mother Love Bone – ‘Apple’

Release Date: August 1990 | Producer: Bruce Calder, Terry Date, Mark Dearnley, and Mother Love Bone | Label: Stardog

For whatever reason, Mother Love Bone just exudes glittering vitamin D from its heavy swagger. Much of their radiance bounces from their flamboyant frontman, Andrew Wood, a glammed-up whirlwind who cut a wholly different hard rock monster than his Seattle peers, scoring the emerging grunge wave at the end of the 1980s.

Exploding with peacocking buoyancy and riffs that land with thunderous heft, Mother Love Bone’s sole album, Apple, manages to rock hard while draped in an evocative purple tincture and commanding bombast. While much of the grunge generation would dwell in darker and more introspective realms, Mother Love Bone crackles with a Dionysian fire at its core, one spin of Apple’s wildcard surge pumping you full of get-go, ready to tackle anything the summer has to throw at you.

Cibo Matto – ‘Viva! La Woman’

Release Date: January 1996 | Producer: Cibo Matto, Mitchell Froom, and Tchad Blake | Label: Warner Bros

A big part of summer for most is the excuse for an outdoor picnic or boozy afternoon, helping yourself to the open platter on display. The power of food is a topic Cibo Matto explored heartily on their Viva! La Woman debut, using the array of life’s dishes as metaphors to plumb the human condition from an artichoke’s lonely leafy by leaf snacking to the familial chaos that can often surround a birthday cake.

Across the pair’s springy trip-hop and sampled bricolage, Viva! La Woman offers a leftfield addition to any summer list of rotations, Cibo Matto’s zingy alt-pop banquet is the ideal finger food for those extra hot days when the soul is needing more than just your average party fodder.

The Knife – ‘Deep Cuts’

Release Date: January 2003 | Producer: The Knife | Label: Rabid

It was really only Ladytron and The Knife that were keeping the synthpop flame alight in the early 2000s, but while the former was shrouded in icy chic, Sweden’s electronic duo dwelt in a warmer pool of primary coloured keyboards and drum machine snap. Such eccentric groove and uniquely Scandinavian candy were corralled immaculately on Deep Cuts, fizzing and racing with pop crackle spiked with just a little dreamy disquiet.

It’s a record for when dusk is about to break on a particularly humid night, Deep Cuts veering between ambient immersions and giddy electro-bounce amid its synth fun house. Inversely, The Knife’s Silent Shout follow-up is a suitably chilly electronic tundra best approached with a scarf and mittens, flexing the perfect summer and winter LP twofer.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – ‘Axis: Bold as Love’

Release Date: December 1967 | Producer: Chas Chandler | Label: Polydor

Acid and sunshine just go hand in hand. Despite dropping in December 1967, Axis: Bold as Love practically harnesses Sol’s lysergic power for Jimi Hendrix at his most romantic of the Experience LPs. When not rustling piquant R&B numbers or out-beefing The Who, delicate mirages like ‘Little Wing’ or the cosmically tearing ‘Bold as Love’ radiate a chromatic warmth Hendrix wouldn’t quite conjure in the same way, in the UK at least.

Stick on Axis: Bold as Love with a decent pair of cans and feel the sun’s rays transport you to that arcane ether that dazzles on the album’s psychedelically dharmic cover, despite Hendrix’s displeasure with the artwork.

Talking Heads – ‘Speaking in Tongues’

Release Date: June 1983 | Producer: Talking Heads and Alex Sadkin | Label: Sire

It’s the summer party, you’re hosting, and the guests are about to arrive. They’re a disparate bunch full of clashing musical tastes, and the internet’s just gone down, so you’re without your meticulously planned playlist. What to do? Well, if a copy of Speaking in Tongues is at hand, just stick on repeat and let it work its magic.

Once Brian Eno had finished his production run on 1980’s Remain in Light, Talking Heads decided to shake off the apparitional sonics and lean further into the Afrobeat squiggle and fatty funk slowly seizing frontman David Byrne’s creative obsessions. What followed was Speaking in Tongues, their fifth album, which throws artpop to the dance floor with unrivalled harmony no band has managed before or since.

As soon as opener ‘Burning Down the House’ is raising the roof, you’ll realise just how magnetic Speaking in Tongues’ pulling power across such diverse tastes is, a record charged with summery blaze and the ultimate secret weapon for any get together across the sunny months.