About

— The Analog Vault // Essential Listening —

Unveiled in 2024 as a self-released project, Diamond Jubilee stands as Cindy Lee’s most expansive and immersive statement to date. Sprawling yet intimate, the album drifts through warped pop melodies, lo-fi textures, and emotional ambiguity, blurring the line between songcraft and atmosphere. Vocals emerge and recede like distant memories, while distorted guitars and soft synths create a dreamlike haze that feels both fragile and deliberate.

Rather than chase clarity, Diamond Jubilee leans into disorientation, inviting listeners to sit with its emotional residue. Widely praised for its ambition and depth, the album solidified Cindy Lee’s cult status, offering a deeply personal work that reveals more with each listen. — The Analog Vault

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Cindy Lee is the performance and songwriting vehicle of Patrick Flegel (who previously fronted influential indie group Women). Over several albums, Flegel has combined delicate melodies and sheer beauty with moments of experimentation. With Diamond Jubilee, Flegel's undeniable songcraft comes to the foreground, embracing a more instant connection and accessibility. Timeless tales of love and longing, surrounded by sticky hooks, take the listener on an unforgettable journey. — (via Label)

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Black vinyl edition. Issued with a 24" x 36" fold-out poster designed by Patrick Flegel.

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The sprawling and spectacular Cindy Lee album is an essential trove of music. This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal?  Or maybe this is Diamond Jubilee, the sprawling and spectacular new album by Cindy Lee: two hours, 32 songs, each one like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits. Even at its most idiosyncratic, the music conveys the archetypal yearning of pop. Nearly every song is about a lover who’s gone, and the dream that their loss—the solitary moonlit nights, the resolve to move on, the resignation to wallow forever—might be as romantic as the love itself. — (via Pitchfork)

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Diamond Jubilee doesn’t strain credulity by claiming to be a record from an alternate dimension. Its greatest strength however is that it sure as hell sounds like it is. Barely a minute of its sprawling 2 hour run time goes by without sounding like a warped memory of every 60s pop song I’ve ever heard all at once. A lengthy jam between The Beach Boys, The Supremes and The Velvet Underground that got lost to time. A record collection of the biggest singles of the late 50s to early 70s, where all the songs are somehow bleeding into each other like colours running on a tie dye shirt. Even the way you listen to it adds to the mystique. It’s not on streaming services, just on YouTube as one long video, which adds to the sensation of it being some mysterious demo or bootleg that somebody found and uploaded. 

Bright sun-kissed melodies and soulful grooves amble along through an indistinct astral haze, following a fittingly dreamlike logic. There’s little structure to the record, one idea shifting into the next, and yet all of it at a consistently high bar of quality in spite of the long run time. It feels unproductive even conceiving of it in terms of individual tracks, rather just one long dream that you drift in and out of, however that’s not to say it doesn’t have its standout moments.

‘Glitz’ rides high on a fuzzy guitar tone and glam rock rhythm that recalls T. Rex’s ‘Hot Love’, before somehow arriving into a world of solemn folk and ominous tolling bells. ‘Olive Drab’ pairs a killer bass groove with sharp stabs of strings, ‘Deepest Blue’ weaves a gorgeous reverb-heavy waltz, while the drum fills on ‘Golden Microphone’ scream classic Motown. ‘GAYBLEVISION’ dabbles in funky electronics, the pensive country pop feel of ‘Demon Bitch’ reminds me a little of ‘Wichita Lineman’, while ‘Flesh And Blood’ feels like a lost progenitor of The War On Drugs and Arcade Fire. The fittingly named ‘Always Dreaming’ is probably the closest thing Diamond Jubilee has to a single. Constantly flitting between shimmering synths, fun grooves, fuzzy guitar, bittersweet jaunty folk, and haunting harmonies on a whim, it’s a great microcosm of the whole project.

There’s a surprising amount of great music on Diamond Jubilee, but without a doubt this is a project that feeds off of being mythologised. Opening your mind up to the idea of music from another world makes our own all the more interesting. There’s no other record in 2024 that has fuelled my imagination the way this has, and in that respect I can’t recommend it enough. — (via Belwood Music)

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Cindy Lee has released their latest album, Diamond Jubilee. Additionally, Diamond Jubilee contains 32 songs on its own. This comes after a nearly four-year wait since their previous album, Cat O’ Nine Tails. The band Cindy Lee has made some of the most interesting sounds in the music scene right now and, overall, turned out quite a good album with some stumbles generally.

The opening track, “Diamond Jubilee”, begins with a unique blend of haunting vocals and guitar riffs that sets it apart from anything you’ve heard before. The song then intensifies and culminates with captivating vocals and sounds, suggesting, if I haven’t already mentioned it, that the band Cindy Lee has crafted a unique sound that is not only unprecedented but also desperately needed. What’s even more remarkable is that the entire album embodies this unique sound. The album possesses a unique sound that is truly unforgettable.

In many ways, Diamond Jubilee feels like a classic, though with some missteps. The instruments used are quite nice and work well with most of the songs, but there is a lack of variety in the opening tracks, and certain instruments would have benefited from less emphasis. If I had any other issue with this work, it would be the clutter. There are 32 songs here, and it is a near impossible job to ask anyone to make 32 incredible songs for one album. Here, the band primarily creates solid songs with a wealth of innovative and awesome tricks. However, by the halfway point, it becomes apparent that the band is attempting to incorporate too many things, resulting in an overall overstuffed work. What’s more, thanks to all of this, the pacing itself starts to become too slow. Despite all of this, this album has a level of uniqueness among each track that is hard not to discuss a million times. Each song here has so many unique elements to them individually that, without a doubt, no other album this year or possibly a decade can compete with them.

Diamond Jubilee is a truly interesting album that will captivate listeners who are lucky enough to have found it. The songwriting and instruments usually pop with life and influence, which guide this work in many ways. If I were to select a single highlight from this work, it would be the atmosphere it establishes across most of the album, a feat that only a work comprising 32 songs could possibly achieve so well.

Overall, Diamond Jubilee is a compelling diamond in a year of classics that, while hurt by some issues, strives to a level of uniqueness and brilliance that makes it one of the most needed albums to listen to this year. — (via Spill Magazine)

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Label: W.25th
Format: 3 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo
Vinyl Record Release: 2025 / Album release: 2024
Genre: Rock, Pop
Style: Hypnagogic pop, Indie Rock, Psychedelic Rock

File under: TAV Essential Listening
File under: Alternative / Indie / Pop
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