Ray Finlayson

Edinburgh

Contributor at Beats Per Minute

A musician of sorts. Sometimes he talks in the third person. Available for weddings/funerals.

Featured in: Favicon

beatsperminute.com Favicon

newsbreak.com

Articles

BPM Curates: May 2025

3 weeks ago | beatsperminute.com | Rob Hakimian |Steve Forstneger |Larry McClain |Nathan Skinner |John Wohlmacher |Ray Finlayson | +1 more

Welcome to the May edition of Beats Per Minute’s monthly playlist BPM Curates. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere the days are getting longer and warmer, and those evenings when it’s nice to just sit out and breathe in the air are the perfect time to sample our new playlist and find you summer obsession. Below is the track list and some notes from our team about why they’ve selected them for this month’s playlist.
Album Review: Billy Nomates - Metalhorse

1 month ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Invada; 2025]It’s safe to say Tor Maries (aka Billy Nomates) has been through the wringer. In between transitioning to managing herself and dealing with an onslaught of misogynistic hate and abuse from a Glastonbury performance (which eventually had to be taken down), Maries lost her father to Parkinsons. All the while, she was working on her third album, Metalhorse. Presented with all this, many would retreat and abandon work.
Album Review: Joy Guidry - Five Prayers

1 month ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Jaid Records; 2025]Compare the monochromatic cover art of Joy Guidry’s new album with that of her previous and you’ll notice a significant difference this time round: Guidry herself is absent, leaving hands holding the impressive headdress that adorned her on the cover to her standout album AMEN. The change is notable: on AMEN, Guidry was facing the world, making a bold statement, but on her new album Five Prayers, she’s offering space.
Album Review: Michael Vallera - The Other World

1 month ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Torn Light Records; 2025]Stratocaster in hand, Michael Vallera sought to create a blanketed, grey world. Back in 2023 he plugged his guitar into a minimal effects chain (which subsequently “fed into a small solid state amplifier”) and conjured his world. The Chicago guitarist and sound artist created music that reminded him of charcoal drawings, monochromatic pieces that thrum and drone like apocalyptic landscapes void of life.
Album Review: Self Esteem - A Complicated Woman

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Polydor; 2025]“Music is about feeling better, making other people feel better. It’s about solidarity; strength in numbers.” For Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) music is community. It’s the banding together to create comfort, to let others hear and be heard, to show other women that they most definitely are not alone. On her previous album, Prioritise Pleasure, Taylor was offering a beacon for those in need. “I just want to let you know there’s a point in you,” she sang with open arms.
Album Review: Julien Baker & Torres - Send A Prayer My Way

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Matador; 2025]Enacting a promise made to each other, Send A Prayer My Way is an album that follows through with a pact to make the music both Julien Baker and TORRES (aka Mackenzie Scott) grew up with, but could never quite see themselves in.
Album Review: New Orthodox - Bull Market on Corn

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Joyful Noise; 2025]How strange and funny it is to be reminded of something by the simplest thing. We see a shade of something familiar, hear an evocative note, have our smell memory activated, and suddenly we’re transported. Consider Scottie from the 1958 film Vertigo, who goes down an obsessive path because an echo of a woman he loved was brought to mind by a passing stranger on the street. Or – from another angle – how jazz musicians will teasingly quote each other during their solos.
Album Review: Bria Salmena - Big Dog

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Sub Pop/Royal Mountain; 2025]Big Dog is a record that tracks a journey, a personal odyssey through turmoil and built up from low points. It’s a document of resilience and hard work that its creator Bria Salmena put in as she shaped the music that mattered to her.
Album Review: Nico Paulo - Interval_o EP

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Forward Music Group; 2025]How can a musician still communicate when they have nothing else to say? It’s a quandary that Portuguese-Canadian musician Nico Paulo faced as she found herself in a sort of creative limbo. “I was feeling like I had run out of things to say, but I still want to sing to people,” she says of the feeling.
Album Review: Kinlaw - gut ccheck

2 months ago | beatsperminute.com | Ray Finlayson

[Bayonet; 2025]Movement is what draws all of Sarah Kinlaw’s work together. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist creates in ways that explores each field and weaves them all together; her movement is musical and her music is motion. She rejects what she calls “traditional ways of working”, instead opting to create and write in ways that feel right to her body. “Almost every time I dealt with anger around language and writing, my fix was to move,” she explains of her process.