Dear Hurts,

Cheer up lads! You’ve got an album coming out! Isn’t that exciting?

If we were in a synth-pop duo, had important, era-defining music to release, and had a record coming out we’d go for something more like the below.

Lots of love,

Love Machine

We’ve often wondered what you get when you cross Bad Romance, Taio Cruz and 3OH!3. Now we know: it sounds like a new single from McFly:

The Love Machine jury remains out, but there’s a good chance that time will show it to be a work of genius. It’s no ‘Obviously’, but what, in all honesty, is?

We were just listening to the new Example album and thinking how, at 15 tracks, it’s a bit long. Then this dropped into our inbox:

The Smashing Pumpkins new album, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, Volume 1: Songs for a Sailor came out a few weeks ago. It’s the first 4 songs of a 44 song album, to be released song by song as MP3’s, and in groups of 4 songs as physical releases.

An album with 44 songs. The Saturdays’ career could be shorter than that at this rate.

But there’s more:

This first release is the most exquisite box set imaginable… a screen-printed wood box containing a 4 song CD, a marbled vinyl 7” record, and a leopard-stone obelisk hand-carved at Macchu Picchu.

A what?

a leopard-stone obelisk hand-carved at Macchu Picchu

That even beats Gaga giving away a lock of her hair in the creepy-and-pretentious-at-the-same-time stakes.

Whatever next: Example giving away a CD’n’Nandos box set? Kylie giving away Dannii?

Anyway, if anyone thinks they can compete with Rammstein they’re very much mistaken:

Glastonbury’s over and we’re rubbish at football, but cheer up - here’s the new Marina & The Diamonds video for ‘Oh No!’

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say The XX probably won’t be borrowing many ideas from it for their next video.

Pop fact: Marina’s middle name is Lambrini. Incredible.