Jazz
Self-released · 3 July 2026
“Atrophy” opens “Disillusion” with a short unaccompanied guitar introduction in a neo-classical vein, and the moment the band comes in the record stops hiding what it wants to be: an electric guitar and tenor saxophone quartet with one foot in progressive rock. Jay Matharu plays guitar and keyboards, Erik Brandell tenor, Christine Lanusse electric bass and Jacob Johnson drums. It was taped in various locations in Sweden and France over the summer and autumn of 2025 and self-released on 3 July.
The eight tracks run thirty-four minutes exactly. “Cog” holds the best guitar moment on the record, an overdriven cascade that breaks in mid-tune; “Shruti”, one thirty-five, opens on a guitar tone imitating a sitar, and two tracks later “Chalo” returns to that ground, where the riff rises and falls while Matharu and Brandell trade solos. Matharu was born in south London in 1981, studied North Indian music with Pandit Sanjay Guha in 2009 and moved to Sweden in 2010; that training shows up in those two pieces and not many more.
The pattern repeats too often: head, guitar solo, tenor solo, head. Six of the eight tracks are built that way and all of them sit between three and a quarter and five and a quarter minutes, which leaves “Bittersweet” — seven eighteen, the closer, a theme with a bluesy cast and Johnson’s snare pushing it — to do the work of giving the album somewhere to arrive.
It’s Matharu’s second album: the first, “These Clouds Are So Undisciplined!”, is from 2017.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents