New Age Steppers - Avant Gardening (LP)

Avant Gardening is the sort of archive release that actually deepens a band’s story rather than just raking the vaults. Issued in 2021 on On-U Sound, it pulls together rare and unreleased New Age Steppers material from the original early 80s run, when Adrian Sherwood’s loose, fearless collective first fused UK post-punk attitude with heavyweight Jamaican dub. You can hear the room, the tape, the nervous energy of musicians who didn’t quite belong anywhere, which is exactly why this stuff still feels alive.

If you’ve spent time with the self-titled debut, Action Battlefield or Foundation Steppers, the DNA is familiar. Sherwood’s mixing desk sits at the centre like an instrument, throwing snares into spring reverb and snapping basslines into sudden focus. Those basslines often came from George Oban of Aswad, and the drum pulse frequently from the late Lincoln “Style” Scott, whose Roots Radics heft gave these sessions their iron core. Over the top, voices drift in and out, sometimes sweet, sometimes feral. Ari Up is the clearest beacon, all yelp and spark, bringing the same unruly spirit she took to The Slits. Mark Stewart’s shadow looms too, a reminder that this was a web of friends crossing between bands and scenes, testing what punk might mean in a dubwise context.

The tracks here don’t play like cast-offs. They feel like missing links, filling in how the group arrived at those towering moments people still point to, like the Junior Byles cover that became a signature tune. There’s a looseness to the performances that rewards close listening. Guitars come in wiry and dub-filtered, often a single figure or scrape doing more emotional work than a wall of chords would. Keyboards bubble with odd harmonics, and then a vocal line glides in, almost conversational, before Sherwood tosses the whole thing through a delay and lets it bloom. It is dub as process, not just effect, and the sense of play is contagious.

What I didn’t expect from Avant Gardening was how well it flows as an album in its own right. The sequencing is smart, shifting between vocal-led cuts and instrumentals so your ears don’t tire of any one texture. The buoyant, off-centre skank that opens things up gives way to slower, smokier pieces where the hi-hat splashes like rain on tin. Then you hit a lean, punky sprint that sounds like smoke curling from a sound system in a squat, and you remember this music grew out of London’s mixed-up reality, not a museum. That versatility is what made New Age Steppers so important in the first place, and why they still feel like an anchor for people who love genre-agnostic music.

Context matters with a set like this. On-U Sound marked a milestone with a broader reissue campaign the same year, including the Stepping Into A New Age 1980–2012 box, and Avant Gardening slots into that story perfectly. It’s not just a companion piece, it’s a reminder of how collaborative the original sessions were. You can trace lines from here to later UK sounds, from Bristol’s trip hop haze to the experimental ends of indie and electronic music. Plenty of producers still chase this mix of grit, space and melody. Few catch it with the same warmth.

For the vinyl heads, this one feels purpose-built. The low end breathes on a turntable, and the space around the percussion opens right up. If you’re hunting New Age Steppers vinyl, this sits neatly next to the classic albums, and Avant Gardening vinyl is a tidy way to hear the band sideways, not just straight on. It’s the sort of record you find at a Melbourne record store while chatting about who actually played on which session, then take home and play twice through because side B hits even better the second time. If you buy New Age Steppers records online, keep an eye out for the On-U Sound pressing, and do the same when you’re digging for other New Age Steppers albums on vinyl in your favourite vinyl records Australia haunts.

The best measure of a compilation like this is simple. Does it make you want to pull the rest of the catalogue off the shelf, or fire up a long afternoon dive into On-U’s world. Absolutely. Avant Gardening doesn’t feel like a footnote. It feels like a freshly opened door into a scene that never stopped being curious, stubborn and open to the unknown. That’s the charm, and that’s the pull.