North London’s prolific neo-jazz wrecking crew Sly & The Family Drone recorded With Love in December 2025 and planned to release it on Valentine’s Day, but missed this cozy date and had to postpone it to the hottest, sweatiest days of August.

The unsettling, electronics-heavy aesthetics of Sly & The Family Drone aren’t the typical soundtrack for pastoral scenes of lovemaking. Still, With Love, suggests how this quintet – tenor sax player James Allsopp, drummers and electronics players Kaz Buckland and Will Glaser, electronics player, vocalist, and percussionist Matt Cargill, electronics player and vocalist Ed Dudley –  organically builds its raw and uncompromising free jazz and Ethio-jazz meets post-rock, drone, and doom metal, dense walls of sound.

There is always a sense of urgency and danger in Sly & The Family Drone’s music, as if its cathartic, psychedelic-tribal ride is about to collapse suddenly into chaotic and noisy freak-out. Even Harold Arlen’s iconic, innocent ballad «Somewhere Over the Rainbow» (from The Wizard of Oz) receives such an efficient, ironic and deconstructive treatment. Only «Snagged On Frowns» fits a familiar mode of openly emotional, spacious kind of balladry.

But beyond the shock treatment, there is an opinionated, inclusive message. This may be the music of the current times, when old beliefs and social and musical conventions are constantly challenged, and when we all experience sensory overload. This wrecking crew offers a resisting alternative, calling for a return to a much-needed primal, physical action, an act of real, personal, dirty, often quite painful and disturbing – and clearly not virtual – love. And a bonus: With Love sounds like the perfect soundtrack for the unbearable heat of the summer.

Eyal Hareuveni

James Allsopp (tenor saxophone), Kaz Buckland (drums, electronics), Matt Cargill (electronics, voice, percussion), Ed Dudley (electronics, voice), Will Glaser (drums, electronics)