Now that you’re lying comatose in front of the fire and pondering on the fact that your intestines are now 80% solid Turkey meat, why not drag yourself away from the dull repeats on the TV, and read some excellent repeats here on ANBAD?

Wait – unless it’s Die Hard on TV. Watch until the end of that, and then read on.

There was a glut of interviews with exciting and thrusting young bands this year on ANBAD, all of which gave us a glimpse into the thrills of belonging to a new band. Here are four of the best:…

Isn’t it nice to be nice? Isn’t it nice to find out your favourite band of 2010 is nice?

Thus, prepare to feel appropriately festive as you are smothered with pleasantries in this exclusive, nice, and exclusively nice, interview with ANBAD’s Band of 2010, Youthless.

To prove that they are such good sports, they answered all of my overwhelmingly facile questions with good grace, a sense of humour and with stories about nearly upending whole buses…

Youthless, you’re ANBAD’s favourite band of 2010. How has 2010 been for you?

Alex: 2010 has been excellent! Gig-wise my highlights have …

At this year’s In The City new music festival, the only band I saw twice was the same band that most  people saw twice – the band which seemed to garner praise at the same exponential rate at which they gained audience members. D/R/U/G/S are a rarity: a band making dance music that legitimately has a foot both in the past – Orbital-esque house – and an exciting future of clever, involving dance music.

Cal, 22, writes the songs and performs them live with George, 19, who he’s known for years. Both Cal and George were in bands before – …

How best to review the best In The City for years? You’ll find acres of praise written (a lot of it here on ANBAD), so adding much more seems superfluous, save for another dollop of much-deserved praise.

Thus, here’s a tremendously glib faux-award ceremony, featuring the best bits, exclusive interviews and a video of a man dancing, playing a keyboard with his forehead, and then falling over.

Widest Variety Of Bass Noises: Youthless. I interviewed the brilliant and lovely Youthless after their excellent last gig at Umbro Studios.

And in case you were thinking of skipping it, remember – …

The sophomore day bristled with collective happiness. Beginning with good-natured Radio 6 Music round-table bickering between Peter Hook and Guy Garvey, whose main job was to get a word in around John Robb‘s chipper motormouth babble, the night embraced an In The City which has truly begun to feel like the breezily ‘now’ festival it ought to.

The streets of the Northern Quarter teemed with cheerful gig-goers, all basking in the realisation that virtually any gig they poked their heads into would be a good one.

Lissie Dancefloor Disaster, direct from Sweden, encapsulated this ethos in one …

Islet are a new band. That much is obvious. Less obvious is the route they took before emergence, which is suddenly, strangely radical. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

I know you’re out there
I know you’re gone
You can’t say that’s fair
Can’t you be wrong?

-Dinosaur Jr., Out There, 1993

Islet are a band who have done it differently without even trying, and the story is not so much a breath of fresh air as a huge, Mistral-sized gust of clean, sweet change.

There was a time when the act of discovering a new band …

Writing about new bands is the fun bit. Wading through acres of PR email bluster to get to the bands is the hard part.

PR emails are a necessary evil – without them I’d have a lot more spare time in my life and would certainly have heard many fewer dreadful Evanescance sound-a-likes that hopeful/stupid PRs think I’ll some how find fascinating.

And yet I would also have missed out on a a raft of thrilling new artists. Thrilling new artists like Li Daiguo, who, on the strength of the PR blurb, ought to have been a truly hellish prospect. …

Dutch Uncles, like Egyptian Hip Hop, are another exciting new Manchester-based band that has chosen a name which guarantees career-long facile questions: whether any band member is Dutch, or is an uncle, or indeed has an uncle from the Netherlands. Maybe it’s why Wu Lyf keep such a low profile.

Either way, these universally strange monikers do highlight the skewed thinking and deliberately obtuse nature of Manchester’s newest crop of bands. Hiding complex musical arrangements behind breathless pop songs and charity shop shirts, Dutch Uncles are more obtuse than most, and all the better for it.

I grappled …

My Awesome Mixtape were reviewed on ANBAD to fairly rapturous acclaim back in November.

I was so taken with their delightful song, I quickly collared them (virtually, of course – they’re based in Bologna) for an interview. Which I then promptly forgot about.

Here it is then, charming pigeon-English intact, a couple* of months late. It turns out they are not only purveyors of lovely, multi-faceted pop songs, but wholeheartedly nice people to boot. Nice people, who, hopefully, will forgive my forgetful indiscretion…

Hi My Awesome Mixtape! How are you? Where are you in the world right now? What you …

Matt shakes his head, raises a fist to the blue, vapour-trail-free sky, and shouts “Damn you!” in mock-anguish. He has no-one in particular to be angry with, but is still frustrated – and for good reason.

He ought to be in New York, playing the violin; instead, Eyjafjallajokull’s petulant ash-gasm means all flights are nixed – so he’s stuck in gloomy Manchester, and nursing a heavy cold to boot.

He shrugs. “Oh well,” he grins, after his momentary release of steam, “what can you do?” Bandmate Rachael suggests that we can go for a coffee, and we all agree that …