Be an angel: This week at South

This week's new releases are led by Sharp Pins' Mod Mayday 23, an early collection of lo-fi garage-pop from Chicago songwriter Kai Slater, originally self-released as a limited cassette. Recorded on a Tascam four-track in his homemade studio, it's full of jangling guitars, infectious melodies, tape hiss and rough-edged DIY charm. These recordings capture the beginnings of Sharp Pins, with Slater's knack for writing brilliantly immediate pop songs already firmly in place.

Also in this week is Smashing Times' early cassette collection, a wonderfully scrappy mix of jangly indie pop, folk-rock and off-kilter art-pop. Adrian Younge's Afro-Disco Makossa brings together Afrobeat, funk and disco inspired by 1970s Ghana, while DJ Notoya's Tokyo Pulse digs into Japanese funk, modern soul and rare grooves from the 70s and 80s.

Elsewhere, Chastity Belt return with All My Friends, a rawer, more introspective collection of guitar-led indie rock, and Twisted Teens deliver another brilliantly ragged mix of blues, folk, country and punk on The Holy Cross Tigers. There's also Sufjan Stevens' Worst Christmas Ever!, collecting favourites from his extensive Christmas recordings alongside a new song, and The Cramps' Songs the Lord Taught Us, reissued on limited grape-coloured vinyl. All available in-store and online now.

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Spacemen 3’s Playing With Fire is one of the great psychedelic records of the late 80s, stripping their sound back to a hypnotic mix of droning guitars, minimal rhythms and hazy, blues-inflected melodies. Released in 1989, it moves between the fragile, almost weightless beauty of tracks like ‘Come Down Softly to My Soul’ and ‘So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)’ and the relentless, distorted repetition of ‘Revolution’ and ‘Suicide’. A killer blend of psychedelia, minimalism and noise, and arguably the band's finest album. UK first pressing, with the insert, right here.