“Hila. A record about loss. What persists beyond the range of ordinary perception? The place mourning keeps returning to — not quite transcendence, not quite doubt. The edge of what we can see.”
In partnership with Born Losers in USA, are thrilled to present the new album by Frankie Rose, Hila.
Self-produced at her home studio featuring collaborations with drummer Justin Welch (Elastica/Lush), Hila was recorded following extensive touring with The Jesus & Mary Chain and Swervedriver. The result is the most confident, searching music Rose has produced; muscular in its production yet emotionally vulnerable in its diffracted neon glow. A record informed by loss and the way grief mutates our senses, it’s fitting that Rose channels the nuanced darkness of later Coil, at times the pounding EBM-production of Skinny Puppy and the near-spiritual alien-ness of Cocteau Twins. On Hila, the doors of perception are constantly melting, revealing the porous nature of the seen and unseen. The result is a synesthesia that flips the senses.
Forever Is A Long Time: 15 Years Of Night School Records FULL LINE UP.
Molly Nilsson Maryjane Dunphe The Space Lady Tristwch Y Fenywod Cucina Povera Guttersnipe Free Love Susannah Stark Band Yu Ching AMOR Whait (Wendy Eisenberg & more eaze) Lady Neptune Suppression Field Gichard Karl D’Silva
Prophetic Justice Ministry’s Key To World Peace is out digitally.
Swirling, subterranean psyche drift from Melbourne’s Sam Perry, PJM’s doomed-on-the-surface balladry is actually charged with the otherside, like a bard probing the membrane between what’s here and what’s beyond. There are moments of earthiness, songs about physical things that beam with a psychedelic strangeness. There’s also a straight up Lana Del Rey cover, because it’s a great song and Prophetic Justice Ministry does it justice.
One night only, the London leg of Night School’s 15th year celebrations welcomes 6 luminaries from the underground. We’re SO HAPPY to be back in the capital, where the label first started, to continue our celebrations from Glasgow’s Forever Is A Long Time festival.
MOLLY NILSSON needs no introduction. A guiding light for underground pop music, Molly Nilsson is a bona fide force of nature now into the 3rd decade of her career. Beginning with hand-burnt CDrs in Berlin in 2008 to reaching millions of souls through the years, Nilsson’s modus operandi has never changed. A radical, politicaly engaged songwriter who can write for the heart as well as the revolution, her live performances are celebratory, minimal masterclasses in charisma and togetherness.
THE SPACE LADY‘s earthly mission – to bring about world peace – always feels achievable during her performances, such is the magic she brings. First beaming down to earth in the early 80s, The Space Lady’s legend transcended the obscurist crannies of the internet following the release of The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits, in 2013. The Space Lady’s reinterpretations of 60s and 70s classics, a kind of alchemy in which she transmutes machismo into a cosmic spirituality, might have created the legend but it’s her blissed out originals that echo out through the ages. A Space Lady performance is like nothing else you’ll see.
YU CHING is a Taiwanese artist who began recording solo music whilst living in Berlin. A deeply evocative blend of melting, shoegaze balladry and yearning drones, her music conjures up heat haze on horizons, dry ice on summer nights, wistful dreams of impossible loves. Yu Ching will be performing from her Night School album The Crystal Hum, plus new material yet to be released. This is her London debut.
WHAIT are a new duo comprising musicians Wendy Eisenberg and more eaze. Separately, they have been amassing individual catalogues that weave dovetailing narratives in the experimental song underground. Both artists work across disciplines ranging from abstract, air-y ambience to baroque songsmithery to drone rock. Together they bring all these elements into a new form as Whait, with moments of vulnerability and melody swimming in space and exploration. This is their London debut.
MARYJANE DUNPHE has blazed a path through underground music since her first group VEXX redefined hardcore’s parameters in the 2010s. A mercurial presence with ecstatic, electric stage performances, her music has gone through several mutations in Pinocchio, The Country Liners and on Night School, CC DUST’s synth pop-punk melange. Since then, with her debut album Stage Of Love, she continues this trajectory into anthemic, pulsing pop music. Her performances are mini plays that tear through the emotional spectrum.
We have ONE MORE secret guest to be announced. Stay tuned.
If you know this label, or me specifically, you’ll know this group are my all time fave and that I get to collaborate with them is a dream. They’re all just the best people. Meet your heroes, sometimes.
We’ve priced them as low as we can get away with while still paying everyone fairly and shipping from UK + USA to try and keep costs low in this environment.
There are 3 designs. Since Yesterday 12″ sleeve, “4 Piece Posing” and “Band In The Snow” the latter two in homage to the original 4 piece version of the group immortalised on the 1982 4 Piece Demo.
USA shirts are Comfort Colors, screenprinted by Magic Circle in Martinez, CA
UK shirts are Stanley/Stella, screenprinted by T-Shirt Cat in Glasgow, Scotland
Today we’re excited to announce Chins For Lefty, the debut album from Glasgow duo Gichard. A duo formed of Lisa Jones and Chas Lalli, the group synthesize a wonky, homespun post-punk aesthetic with a surreal, blackly comic lyrical focal point.
Your Private Hell is the first single taken from the album is out now. The video, filmed by Harrison Reid in Glasgow, is streaming now on YouTube.
Chins For Lefty is the debut album and first recording by Gichard, a new duo chronicling the absurdities of end-stage capitalism and mouldering social rituals from their vantage point in Glasgow, Scotland. Recorded primarily in the band’s home studio straight to tape, Chins For Lefty combines gorgeous, ramshackle melody, DIY kosmische punk, drum machine + synth and, in vocalist/lyricist Lisa Jones, an absurdist commentator on the human condition as it navigates the anxieties of the modern world.
Instrumentalist Chas Lalli’s swirling music accompaniment stitches an evocative mix of musical styles, the ragged wind beneath the lyrics’ wings. Although the duo first collaborated in their previous group Dragged Up, their disparate musical and artistic backgrounds make for an alluring mix in Gichard. Lalli has spent the last 20 years in the Glasgow underground, most notably in the noise rock group VOM, while Lisa Jones’s practice was in poetry and spoken word. Beginning as co-vocalist in her previous band, in Gichard her lyrics are centre stage; the vision concocted alongside Lalli amounts to a total world-build.
Chins For Lefty scans almost like a novel, with each track elucidating a skewed universe that bears only some resemblance to the one you and I partake in. Like all works of fiction Gichard’s songs are rooted in reality and the lived experiences of its authors, but here characters are exaggerated, social mores and habits are pulled apart to reveal their inherent alienness. Universal emotions are laid bare, the bright light of anxious examination searching out every hairline fracture in our relationships. Distorted and cracked, the mirror that Gichard hold up to our world is also pretty damn funny.
Opener Cholesterol Test launches an expansive, cosmic guitar and synth intro that belies the Tascam-tape recorder it was recorded onto, like a Chromatics cut substituting anxiety for overt sexuality. Here Jones intones an apology to a non-responsive recipient, in the medium of a long voice note forensically deconstructing an interaction from the night before. Over punk guitars and shuffling, lo-fi drum machine splutters, the narrator in Asking The Apes “prefers things to people” before being taken hostage in the city zoo to confess an obsession which consumes the protagonist, ending with the immortal two liner “I sleep in a cocoon of old newspapers at the end of your street / And I think I have been fired from my job,” On album standout Posthumous Hologram, the narrator is faced with a human simulacra, in this case an undead pop star; the face of the encroaching technological singularity. Yes, it does requests, it can do My Way in 200 different language options. But what are the implications? While you’re left pondering, the alternating deadpan verse delivery and undeniably catchy chorus keep you company.
By the time Break Up With Johnny Dogbirth rattles into view, the band are satirising a suburban inanity blown up to cartoon proportions, soundtracked with a drawled musicality that recalls Rowland S. Howard’s post-Birthday Party balladeering. This approach is furthered on Human Resources: over an angular guitar+bass track, Jones’s short story recalls Dry Cleaning’s erudite lyrical post punk. On Soft Face, Lalli’s guitar and drum machine are swathed in echo and delay, as Jones dissects dating rituals with a west of Scotland drollness. Hamming It Up brings a porcine perspective in a short story that begins with the line “I was breastfeeding discreetly in the service station. She didn’t mind.” What follows is a passage punctured with canned laughter and a narrative involving tribute acts, modern farming techniques.
Brilliant first single Your Private Hell closes the album, the closest the group get to earnest perhaps, filtered through a surreal central Scottishness. While Your Private Hell might seem like a sardonic take down of romance, perhaps it’s the very distillation of love in all its awkwardness, selflessness and weirdness. Here there’s a distinctive Glasgow-ness to this doomed romance: the protagonist falls for an outsider, offers them cheap jarred hot dogs and carbolic soap (the infamous, excoriating soap dished out in schools and government buildings throughout Scotland), offers to cover up a murder, stalks them in the all-night Spar. It’s a short story of intrigue, murder and the irresistible pull of self-sacrifice to share in someone else’s suffering. If that’s not love, what is it? You can see this vision mapped out in black and white on their video for Your Private Hell here.
This is it, then: the world as narrated by Gichard. Absurd, laugh-out-loud-funny and maybe even with a little earnestness mixed in, just don’t look too hard.
Absolutely thrilled to welcome old friends Guttersnipe to Night School.
Extinction Burst! is the new invocation in album-form by Guttersnipe, Leeds’ premier and pre-eminent XFCER (XFCER: Xenofeminist crisis-energy rock)* duo. Slamming at full speed to multi-dimensional oblivion, Extinction Burst! is the most full, hi-definition lurid dream-mare yet spewed out by Uroceras Gigas & Tipula Confusa.
Engineered and mixed by Ross Halden at Hohm Studio in Bradford and mastered by Rashad Becker, Extinction Burst follows 2018’s My Mother The Vent, which garnered universal critical adoration. Nevertheless, this long-awaited follow up is more extreme: it is wildness beyond reason, splitting new tears in the reality gauze, ultimate hallucination through sound ecstasy.
Wednesday 22nd April – Leeds – Wharf Chambers Saturday 25th April – Shrewsbury – English Bridge Studios Sunday 26th April – Birmingham – Supersonic Festival
We are so excited to bring Rose McDowall’s Cut With The Cake Knife back in print. This is initially available as a Dinked edition for UK-based shops, we’ll be posting up the standard version later.
Red & black marble vinyl Alternative album artwork Signed* risograph poster Gold foil sticker Numbered obi-strip 12″ x 24” insert Limited pressing of 500
Remastered Audio for 2026.
Recorded in the aftermath of Strawberry Switchblade’s break up, the original “Sunflower Demos” included songs intended for the unrealised 2nd album. These songs posit an alternative future where McDowall pursued a Pop career instead of becoming an underground icon.
“In McDowall’s world, cake and chaos go hand in hand. She’s the witch at the door of the gingerbread house, beckoning you inside.”
– Pitchfork
“One wonders what would have happened had these delirious songs made it to mainstream radio airplay. The exquisite nature of this slices of dappled pop genius is a joy to behold.”
-The Quietus
Rose McDowall’s Cut With The Cake Knife was originally reissued in 2015 by Night School Records and Sacred Bones. Since then, Rose McDowall and her previous band Strawberry Switchblade have only grown in cult status. Following a discovery by a generation of young, disaffected kids on social media of Strawberry Switchblade and McDowall’s succeeding band Sorrow, Night School Records has remastered Cut With The Cake Knife and presents the album with a reimagined artwork that more closely recreates the original hand-made CD produced by McDowall.
Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.
Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.
Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They’re real sad songs, about real life. I’ve had people come up to me to say I’d connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, “that’s power.”
Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”
Today we’re announcing the first official Strawberry Switchblade merch to be made available in 40 years. This is the first drop.
These shirts have been made with the blessing and collaboration of Strawberry Switchblade.
10 years ago when we were planning the release of the 1982 4 Piece Demo, it was always in the plan to make Strawberry Switchblade shirts to accompany it. It’s taken a while…
When I first fell in love with the band as a teenager, like a lot of fans I bought Strawberry Switchblade merch wherever I could find it. These were bootlegged shirts, badges, patches made by enthusiasts, genuine fans and opportunists alike. While we’re not here to judge it always felt a little off that the members of Strawberry Switchblade were never able to represent themselves to their fans in this way. This is the thinking behind designing and making Strawberry Switchblade merch now, in 2026.
For the first drop, there are 3 designs. 2 are new designs based on the 1982 4 Piece Demo release and featuring the original, surviving contact sheet photographs by Peter McArthur. These are designed by Musheto Fernandez in Glasgow. The other design is a reproduction of the classic Since Yesterday 12” single art from later in the band’s career, the most recognisable version of the group, and is probably the most commonly bootlegged image.
These shirts have been made with the blessing and collaboration of Strawberry Switchblade.
These will be available at first on the Night School Bandcamp. There are two shipping locations: UK and USA for optimum shipping rates.
We will be taking Pre-orders and shipping these at the end of April from both locations.
