Get ready for your week ahead with an impeccable selection of our favourite songs from the past week.
Honeymoons – Banff
You can’t get much more dreamy than ‘Banff’. Its guitars are dripping with reverb, its bassline drifts like a cloud and the vocals are distant, full of anguish, but calming. There’s elements of dream-pop and psyche, but the song is lean and focussed. Couple all this with the fact the chorus will stick to you for days, and it’s hard not to get excited about Honeymoons.
Sweet Baboo – Wild Imagination
A combination of a lounge-band drum machine beat and sweet, almost childish, keyboards on this new Sweet Baboo song, form the perfect bed for the North Wales song-writer to explore on. His vocals are low-key and charming, whilst the swell and ebb of the other layers of instrumentation make this song sound like a lo-fi version of Talking Heads.
Cousin Kula – What You Know
What we’ve heard from Bristol six-piece so far has been full-throttle psych-pop fun, but on this new single, the band have decided to slow it down. Syrup-thick synths seep through the distant vocals, whilst the songs layers build. There’s flashes of colour from the guitars, stabs of bright synths before the song explodes into interweaving solo layers. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to close your eyes in a sunny field and spin round and round into eternity.
(Sandy) Alex G – Sportstar
It’s becoming increasingly hard to guess what the new (Sandy) Alex G record will sound like, as every single so far sounds so different to the last. Straight away, ‘Sportstar’’s pitched up, vocoded vocals, which feel lifted straight from a PC Music song, peg it as different. But whilst the simple piano line and skittering drums give the feel of a Frank Ocean offcut, it still feels very much like an Alex G song.
The Death Of Pop – Ms Jackson
The Death of Pop have decided to seduce us all with their shimmering cover of the Outcast classic for a new compilation for Hairy Records. With the beautiful cascading piano lines and funky guitar, the re-work sounds like a long-lost 80’s original that Outcast took inspiration from.
The Sea Life – Blame
This first single off The Sea Life’s self-titled LP starts with a urgent cinematic blend of guitars. All of a sudden this breaks down, leaving the impassioned vocals, commanding bass and fuzzed guitar to dissipate, occupying their own spaces before building again and again. It’s a intriguing taste of the album, which is due to be released jointly by Art is Hard and Babe City Records.
Rad Frü – Wiggley
Big riffs are back baby, and Rad Frü are bringing them by the bucket load. The two-piece have been charming us all with their fun take on 70’s rock for a while now, but new single ‘Wiggley’ is their most outrageous yet.
Pallas – Render
A disorientating whirlwind of noise, ‘Render’, by Atlanta quintet Pallas, is over before it’s begun. The guitars are dissonant, the time signatures all over the place, but its chaos is measured and is an avant-garde blast that you will rewind over and over again.
Perfume Genius – Die 4 You
One of the cuts off Perfume Genius’ new album No Shape, ‘Die 4 You’ is completely engrossing. Appearing towards the tail-end of the record, its pulsating minimal beat, whirling piano and exposed vocal set the song apart from everything else on the album. Indeed, it sounds sonically similar to a few of the tamer tracks from the new Arca record. A fantastically forward thinking piece of dark pop.
Froth – Petals
“How was I supposed to know” question Froth on this slow flowering, spacey ballad. It starts off simply enough, with just the delicate vocals and soft guitar, but with each gear change, a layer is added, sonically expanding like the universe we live in. The video’s hypnotising visuals capture perfectly the songs unstoppable force.
We’ll be posting more of our favourite songs, same time, same place.
