girl_irl “Bullseye”

“Bullseye” reminds me a bit of Tricky circa Pre-Millennium Tension and Angels With Dirty Faces, when he was trying to make his funk grooves as abrasive as possible to scare off anyone who liked the more overtly R&B qualities of Maxinquaye. But whereas his greatest stylistic trick was to double his breathy, muttered raps with the more soulful and angelic voice of Martina Topley-Bird, girl_irl embodies both his menace and Topley-Bird’s femme grace in her vocal on this song. The tone of the lyrics is kinda braggy and swaggy, but as much as she proclaims herself a goddess and roasts this other person she’s entangled with, the context seems messy and toxic enough that you question how she’s in this situationship if she’s so elevated and cool. But I think that’s a lot of the point, the idealized self-image punctured yet preserved.

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Geese “Mysterious Love”

Cameron Winter sings like a guy totally in love with cool rock voices and is trying to inhabit as many of them as possible from moment to moment in any Geese song. Take “Mysterious Love” – from one line to another, he’s a little Mick Jagger, he’s a little Thurston Moore, he’s a little Lou Reed, he’s a little Jack White, he’s a tiny bit Tom Verlaine and Jarvis Cocker. He’s pulling from a lot of sources but the goal is emboding “cool rock guy,” a person with a lot of attitude who knows what’s up, who knows how to have a good time, who’s rarely predictable and is never uptight. He never sounds shy. You can tell Winter has a great sense of humor about what he’s doing, but also that he’s taking the job of rock and roll singer very seriously and pushing himself to his physical limits with absolute earnestness. This is the magic combination for rock music – fun and volatile and trashy and silly and flirty and thoroughly convinced of its own coolness.

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Tanukichan “Don’t Give Up”

Tanukichan are very unapologetic about their extreme late 90s vibe, looking and sounding as though they’re a shoegaze band signed to Grand Royal in 1997 who were pushed through a time portal into our era. Toro Y Moi’s production on their new record only exacerbates this by placing a lot of emphasis on the percussion, which mostly sounds like how alt-rock drummers started emulating dance rhythms and hip-hop drum loops starting around 1996. Besides this the most interesting element of the band’s sound is how Hannah von Loon’s pummeling bass parts contrasts with her softly murmured vocals, as though she’s using her instrument to express a bold aggressive at odds with her more demure impulses. A lot of shoegaze music sounds like a small and sensitive voice trying to break through the noise, but in her case it sounds more like she’s trying to beat down her voice with the bass.

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Addison Rae “It Could’ve Been U”

Addison Rae is famous – and in many circles fully iconic – as a dance-centric Tiktok personality, and she’s been flirting with a pivot to pop stardom for a little while now. From what I can tell some of the hesitancy has been in finding the right music to suit her persona and aesthetic, which Stargirl’s Emma Baker has described (in great detail!) as a joyful expression of “embodiment.” Which is to say she has a seemingly effortless and carefree physicality, an incredible asset to any pop star but something that’s a bit ambiguous in terms of pairing with music that could potentially be hugely popular in the moment.

Going on Baker’s conception of Rae I think the most obvious type of song for her would be something along the lines of Whitney Houston’s classic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” or Beyoncé’s “Love On Top,” but even if someone could write a song of that caliber for her, I don’t think she’s necessarily ready to sing like that. The second most obvious thing, and probably more in Rae’s wheelhouse, would be to emulate prime era Britney Spears. But if your goal is to reach teens now, you probably have to meet them where they are, and so that means the best songs on Rae’s new EP are post-Olivia Rodrigo pithy rock songs with a little extra dance-pop gloss.

“It Could’ve Been U” is co-written and produced by Alexander 23, a rock-leaning pop producer whose best-known work is contributing to Rodrigo’s mega-smash “Good 4 U.” He does fantastic work here in crafting a tight, hook-packed song that fits well next to any Rodrigo rocker but also feels like something Selena Gomez might’ve done earlier in her career. It also sounds like something you could easily nudge into a killer EDM remix if that was required. It’s interesting to hear the song in the context of the track Charli XCX produced for this EP, which sounds rather stale – I assume Charli gave her pretty old scraps? In any case, it’s a situation where in shopping around for a style it’s clear that for the moment she’s got a couple songs that are fully of this current zeitgeist, right on down to the requisite ultra-literal first-person expression of resentment towards an ex. It sounds fresh and fun, and I have no idea whether this will be Rae’s pop lane in the long run but it suits her right now.

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Margaret Glaspy “Female Brain”

One thing I like a lot about Margaret Glaspy is the way her music is always contrasting delicacy and bluntness in its physicality, which carries over to her lyrics and singing. She conveys warmth and sensuality as often as she’s putting up her defenses and guarding her boundaries, and it’s not presented as a contradiction as much as a reasonable way of living in a harsh world. Glaspy’s new record Echo the Diamond almost completely strips out the R&B aspects of her music and focuses on the more rough and cathartic side of what she does. “Female Brain” stands out as a particularly blunt and edgy song – overtly resentful and confrontational in its lyrics, and so taut and tense that it sometimes feels like it might snap with a little more strain. It’s a terse and scathing little song, not quite violent but definitely irritated to the point where that doesn’t seem out of the question.

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Serebii “±”

Every time I hear “±” I’m a little surprised when the lead vocals come in about two thirds of the way through a piece of music that seems pretty comfortable as a fairly zoned-out instrumental piece. It feels a little like walking around a place you’re pretty sure is completely empty but eventually finding someone who barely notices you. Serebii’s vocal is lovely and plaintive but it’s not nearly as evocative as what he does with keyboards and what sounds like rhythmic breathing on this track. The atmosphere is thick and humid, every sound feels a little wet or dripping. But there’s also a cool current in it, like catching a little bit of stray air conditioning on an oppressively hot day.

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Jamila Woods featuring Duendita “Tiny Garden”

One of the things that has become most annoying to me writing this site over the years is that I don’t have the skill to hear music and explain exactly what’s happening on a musical level, so I have to always write around that. A lot of the time that’s fine, and writing more descriptively or poetically gets closer to what I like about the music anyway. But in the case of a song like “Tiny Garden” I’m left very frustrated because one of the things I find most refreshing and appealing about it musically is that something about it feels very mid 90s to me, but I can’t identify what I’m recognizing. Like, would I say this song feels something like Dionne Farris’ mid 90s hits? Yes, but I don’t know why. I’m just glad to have that feeling back again. Maybe you can tell me what I’m hearing here.

“Tiny Garden” is a very thoughtful love song. Jamila Woods is singing about a sustainable kind of love that goes beyond the sort of initial infatuation that is the standard muse of pop music. The title metaphor is lovely – it’s humble, it’s natural, it’s something that takes time and steady attention, it’s something potentially beautiful and useful. There’s a deep patience and generosity of spirit in this song that I find very moving, along with the implication that Woods isn’t wasting her time on just anyone. The love feels reciprocal, she’s just trying to keep it alive and thriving.

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Miguel featuring Lil Yachty “Number 9”

“Number 9” basically sounds like if Timbaland had produced Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, which is a bold but not at all illogical musical stunt. Miguel’s arrangement hinges on a very Panda Bear type of choral melody but removes the dense layers of sound you’d expect to hear on an Animal Collective record in favor of a stark beat and simple deep bass line. The emphasis on syncopation and minimalism casts the vocal hook in sharp relief, resulting in a very striking and alien sound that’s also more than a little churchy. Lil Yachty’s part has the structural utility of a guest rap verse but is just as melodically and harmonically interesting as Miguel’s layers of vocals, particularly as the song elegantly slides out of that verse into another round of the chorus. This is a stunning piece of music, something that simultaneously sounds like it’s from the future and the distant past. Miguel and Yachty both have reputations as adventurous genre-bending artists but this is pushing into very exciting uncharted territory so I’m dying to hear what else Miguel has cooked up for his fifth record.

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Maribou State “Blackoak”

The string arrangement in “Blackoak” gives the song a majestic feel, but it’s a casual sort of majesty I’d compare to, say, Lisa Stansfield’s classic “Been Around the World.” I think a lot of this comes down to the way a very lived-in soulful vocal part adds depth to the drama built up by the music rather than amps it up further. It counters the hyperbolic quality of the arrangement without deflating it and conveys a very centered perspective that really sells the gratitude at the heart of the song. That sentiment hits harder with the implication that it’s coming from someone who sees the person they’re addressing very clearly.

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Burial “Unknown Summer”

In the same way that Wes Anderson is a cartoonist who somehow works in the medium of live action film, Burial is a filmmaker who somehow works in the medium of music. This is especially true of Burial’s more recent works, which tend to be one-off singles that contain enough musical ideas to feel like entire albums condensed into ten minutes or so. This isn’t to say that there’s a plot to these songs, but more that the movements in the music come across as scenes that imply narrative structure. Even with some intelligible vocal samples floating through the track this is a very abstract work and the bits that really hit are purely musical – an opening sequence that deliberately fries your perception of time, a balearic house keyboard part that feels like a flashback to a happier time, the way everything in the final third seems to slowly disintegrate. All the little disorienting asymmetries in this track are masterfully edited and lend the overall composition a bittersweet nostalgic quality that I find very, very moving in ways I can’t quite explain.

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Jungle “Back on 74”

“Back on 74” is a beautifully composed delivery system for a gorgeously harmonized chorus, one so smooth and balmy and comforting that it can make your whole body suddenly relax upon hearing it. The verses feel relaxed too, but a little tighter as the chords and vocal cling to a crisp pocket beat, opening up a lot of negative space in the mix. Once the harmony vocals click in the song gets a lot more dense but the weight shifts, making it feel like you’ve suddenly plunged into a warm pool of water. Jungle and their collaborators are using a lot of old R&B tricks here to great effect but the song doesn’t come out sounding super retro – you recognize the old moves, but the structure and tone feels a little more…mechanical? It’s not electronic, but you can intuit a lot of electronic music ideas informing the decisions here.

Buy it from Jungle.

Model/Actriz “Slate”

“Slate” is essentially a song about unrequited love performed with the life-or-death intensity of horror, from Cole Haden’s breathy and desperate vocals on down to Jack Wetmore’s guitar, which sounds like frantic metal clicking, and not much like guitar at all. Model-Actriz’s music mostly sounds like a fresh take on industrial to me – all harsh mechanical tones, unrelenting grooves, and strong suggestion of both vulgarity and sadomasochism. They often sound like they’re trying to channel “March of the Pigs” and “Closer” simultaneously, with Haden bringing an erotic charge and overt sensuality to their most brutal and abrasive music. It’s clear enough in “Slate” that lust and violence overlap quite a bit for Haden and as much as the song expresses a deprived and distressed mindset of someone who knows they can’t have exactly what they want, they can’t deny their satisfaction in the submission and humiliation.

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The Alchemist featuring Earl Sweatshirt and Billy Woods “RIP Tracy”

Earl Sweatshirt’s voice is deep, his cadence is precise, and he often writes in odd meters that disrupt expectations. He tends to use this as a distancing device – he frequently sounds cold, or dismissive, or fully misanthropic to the point of shutting everyone out. This is interesting, but what makes him compelling is the way he slips in little moments of vulnerability or warmth that break up the flat affect. This approach casts every feeling in sharp relief – he sounds more wounded, more angry, more depressed when the feelings are exposed through the vocal armor. He’s very well suited to The Alchemist’s production style, particularly on “RIP Tracy,” which conveys a similar mix of feelings but contrasts Sweatshirt’s bitter tone with a sentimentality, even if that’s only coming through between scare quotes in a sample. Billy Woods also shines here, wrapping the song on a verse that’s more nakedly emotional in the performance but goes even darker in the lyrics.

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Tinashe “Talk to Me Nice”

“You got options, I got options” Tinashe sings in “Talk to Me Nice,” a song about what sounds like a very pleasant situationship that nevertheless has a tension running through it that suggests that there’s more angst and unresolved feelings expressed in this music than she’s letting on in the lyrics. Nosaj Thing and Scoop DeVille’s track centers a tranquil keyboard tone but frames it with syncopated beats that signal both sexiness and mild anxiety, not exactly undermining the vibe but definitely complicating the mood of it. My favorite musical move in this song comes after the chorus, when the chords shift up for an overtly melancholic bridge sequence in which Tinashe drops the carefree NSA front for a moment to get into what she truly values – loyalty, realness, feelings money can’t buy. She’s not negating anything she’s said there, but you do get the impression she’s wanting more than she’s getting and trying to smooth out some cognitive dissonance.

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Rose of the West “Come and Find Me”

“Come and Find Me” makes lyrical nods to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” but musically the reference points are all late 80s goth and the darker edges of dance pop. Gina Marie Barrington and her collaborators inhabit a very familiar vibe here without aping any song in particular, emulating specific tones and settings but bending it all into something with a distinctive shape. Barrington’s lyrics deliberately blur the lines between love song and political song, presenting any variation on human relationships as a question of love and respect – ie, if you’re not getting the respect, is it really the love at all?

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The Kills “LA Hex”

The Kills have been away for quite some time now, but have returned with a couple songs that sound as though we’ve missed some of their creative evolution in the meantime. Jamie Hince’s arrangement on “LA Hex,” as well as its double A side counterpart “New York,” feels deliberately lopsided and hobbled. The beat lurches a bit, the music generally feels like a hole has been shot through it but it wasn’t enough to kill the song. Hince and Alison Mosshart sound like they’re muttering just out of synch with each other while making their way through a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, the main synth part bearing down on them like hot dry air. Hince keeps the song in the Kills comfort zone by tossing in that signature guitar effect that sounds sorta like a car engine, but then pushes in the opposite direction by adding a choir near the end. The choir part really makes the song, adding an unexpected dignity and grace to a song that feels like it could suddenly collapse at any moment.

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Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee featuring James Murphy “Los Angeles”

Here’s an interesting mix of characters – the drummer of the most classic iteration of The Cure, the drummer from Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the producer of late period works by R.E.M. and U2, with the guy who does nearly everything on LCD Soundsystem records as a guest on vocals. James Murphy’s presence is pretty overwhelming on this song, to the point that the arrangement just sounds like something he would do left to his own devices – imagine Suicide doing a shuffle, but with a classic New York City guy singing about Los Angeles as if it’s a city full of literal monsters. I like how crazed Murphy sounds here, like he’s hamming it up just enough to make it clear he’s kinda joking, but not completely.

Buy it from the band.

Activity “Where the Art is Hung”

Travis Johnson’s arpeggiated guitar in “Where the Art is Hung” has an interesting weight to it – light enough to feel like an object floating in the breeze, but dense enough for that to feel like something that shouldn’t be happening. There’s a distinct supernatural vibe going on here and it only intensifies when Jess Rees starts singing, sounding like a ghost passing through the mix. The most impressive part of this song is that as the percussion builds to a climax it doesn’t change the implied density of the music at all. The drums sound as though they’re trying to keep a spirit in place, like a vain attempt to set a perimeter around something that can’t be contained.

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Suki Waterhouse x Belle & Sebastian “Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility”

“Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility” is a title that could reasonably be applied to nearly every song in the Belle & Sebastian catalog, in as much as it’s basically the thesis statement of nearly everything Stuart Murdoch and his bandmates have written for three decades. It’s a world view that balances acknowledgment of life’s many difficulties with an equal awareness of the beauty in life, particularly in the smaller moments. This song, made in collaboration with musician/actress Suki Waterhouse, comes at the title premise idea from a few directions at once. It’s a song about shaking off little humiliations, it’s a song about wishing you could communicate with your younger self, it’s a song about trying to make the best of what you have. The most interesting angle in this song for me is how they approach relationships as a frustrating and beautiful mystery – you don’t know how long anyone will ever be in your life, and the amount of time someone’s in your life isn’t necessarily proportional to their impact.

Waterhouse, whose voice isn’t far off in timbre from that of central B&S member Sarah Martin but conveys a little more angst, fits very naturally into the Murdoch milieu. This would’ve sounded lovely in Murdoch’s voice but I think Waterhouse’s glamor is key in setting the scale of it, particularly in the way in places someone who arguably has it all – a music career, a modeling career, an acting career, her boyfriend is the guy who plays Batman – and asks you to understand her as an ordinary person doing ordinary things and experience ordinary emotions. She subverts her image, but also opens it up.

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Disclosure “Higher Than Ever Before”

It’s not too surprising to me that Disclosure would mess around with drum-and-bass breakbeats given that they’re essentially dance music scholars with a gift for emulating different styles, and that they certainly get that this style of drum programming is back in fashion. The surprising thing to me is more in how they did it. “Higher Than Ever Before” has a strong modern psychedelia vibe to it, a sound Philip Sherburne described as “What might a golden-age jungle remix of Tame Impala sound like?” I think that’s a very accurate read, though I’d say it’s more like if The Chemical Brothers made a “Setting Sun” based on The Slow Rush instead of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” In any case, there are some truly ecstatic moments in this song and I’d love for them to do some music in this lane.

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Depeche Mode “Wagging Tongue” (Wet Leg Remix)

This Wet Leg remix of a recent Depeche Mode song does not sound that much like either of those bands, but it DOES sound like a lost indie dance track from the mid to late 2000s blog house era and a particularly good one at that. The original version of “Wagging Tongue” is a fairly solemn meditation on mortality and loss set to Martin Gore arrangement that’s about as Kraftwerk-y as he ever gets. Wet Leg toss most of that and scramble the rest, placing the emphasis on an indie disco groove and a wordless cooing vocal hook sung by Rhian Teasdale and/or Hester Chambers. There’s a distinct “Heart of Glass” feeling to this without necessarily emulating anything specific about the Blondie classic. Some artists use remixes as a testing ground for ideas they’d like to explore and I certainly hope this is a direction Wet Leg are considering going on their next record – the vibe would suit them well and it would add something fresh to their live show without repeating all the same moves from their debut.

Buy it from Amazon.