Early 2020, despite being three short years ago, was an entirely different time. We could go out for as long as we wanted, meet in as big a group as we liked, and Phoxjaw had just released their debut album. ‘Royal Swan’ was a distinctly British first record which had an externalising power and a flavour that seemed to touch all those idiosyncratic reaches of this sceptred isle’s culture. But then the pandemic happened and the world seemed to shrink. Phoxjaw’s music took a turn for the claustrophobic, becoming more dense, crystallised and compact like nihilistic cane sugar, still with that delicious candy quality but shaded by nostalgia for how the world was before we all had to stay inside. ‘Notverynicecream’, their second album and the result of their isolation, is a tremendously comple...