"He's also an anti folk artist and a friend. He's super underrated. For me there could be an alternative universe where Turner Cody is considered to be like Neil Young or Townes Van Zandt. He totally deserves that. His catalogue is as good as theirs, people need to wake up and hear it. This album is a good starting point to explore Turner's work. It's from the period of his life where he almost began to become the young Arthur Rimbaud. It's a very literary folk record, and he's also the most romantic anti folk songwriter. A lot of anti folk uses humour and satire, but Turner's stuff has always been deeply romantic without being particularly funny which sent him apart from the more punky stuff that went straight for your throat. He's a romantic, mystic poet who makes music. The title track actually paints New York City as an anthropological creature that's going through the processes of change. He really taps into corruption and decline and the surrounding elements that led into the financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit and Donald Trump. I feel like Turner understood these things were going to happen. If you listen to this record and his next one, Who Went West, it's all about what's happening now, yet he was just a 19-year-old who felt what would come. The lyrics are all prophetic in n that way, he understood what would happen in the world."

"I got a cassette from a cousin of mine that had The Offspring, Smash, on one side and Nirvana's Bleach on the other. That was definitely the wake-up call of rebellion and antagonism, but the first record I really got into from thereon was Surfer Rosa. It felt so alien but so familiar. It really clicked on a bone marrow level that felt like it had pre-existed for me. I bought Death To The Pixies at the same time on tape from HMV in Oxford and I just became obsessed with that record. I listened to it again recently and it reminded me particularly about how I could connect with Frank Black's lyrics despite not being aware of any real narrative when I was much younger. I don't think Foals would exist without the Pixies. I love the oddness and the strangeness of the Hispanic/punk/pop influence - it should be wrong, it shouldn't work but it does, really well. More recently I re-listened to his lyrics and appreciated how humorous they are, which reminded me that things don't need to be too obvious or narrative-based, they can be just fragments of thought. It opened the gateway into everything that then consumed me for the next ten years (Oxes, Albini, Sonic Youth, Godspeed - the American guitar alt/post-hardcore/post-rock world). Without Surfer Rosa I may have stayed with Nirvana and The Offspring…"