I really enjoyed reading Wouter's post about his top 25 albums of all time and realised that for someone who mentions music pretty prominently in my bio, I barely talk about it on my blog.

I might do a top 25 albums post at some point but for now, I am content to share a couple of music updates that excited me this week.

Firstly, on Wednesday Mike Portnoy announced that he's going to be returning to Dream Theater which is awesome. Mike Mangini who's been drumming for the band since MP left has been doing an admiral job (he was pretty well qualified, previously holding the world record for the highest number of drum beats in a minute - 1203). MP is one of the main creative voices in the band so hopefully, with his return, we might see a return to concept albums like Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Metropolis.

Three women stood on a stage performing music
The Last Dinner Party performing at Glastonbury 2023, Photo by By Raph_PH - Glasto2023 (134 of 468), CC BY 2.0

Secondly this morning, flicking through my youtube subs, I spotted that The Last Dinner Party recently released a new single My Lady of Mercy which is yet another stunning tour de force that demonstrates the bands' collective musicianship and creativity. I've been closely following them since Spotify's AI DJ recommended them to me in June and they recently featured on Later with Jools Holland I can honestly say I think they're one of the most exciting and fresh acts to make it into "mainstream" that I've seen in the last decade or so. I'm really keen to try and find tickets to them next year but they've only got three upcoming tour dates and unsuprisingly they're all sold out.