In an interview with Vulture’s Rachel Handler, Fiona Apple explained that “Cosmonauts”—a standout from her long-awaited fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters—was originally intended for Judd Apatow’s 2012 film This Is 40. Apatow asked her to write a song about two lovebirds who would be together forever. “That’s not really a song I’m equipped to write because I don’t know if I want to be together with anybody forever,” she said. “I guess that’s why I interpreted it as like, ‘It’s going to be you and me in this little vessel by ourselves in space, except it’s going to weigh a lot more, and you’re going to really get on my nerves."
In his most recent releases as Earl Sweatshirt, Thebe Kgositsile pondered death. “WHOLE WORLD,” one of two new songs featured on forthcoming vinyl pressings of his last project, Feet of Clay, finds Kgositsile reckoning with entropy’s slow approach. By contemplating personal loss as well as the world’s degeneration, he becomes both a gravedigger and an enemy of the state. “My effervescence lost, but not entirely, I shrug the venom off/And kept a tiny piece for times we in a war,” he raps...
A gift exchange between a mother and daughter is at the center of “Sweet,” the fourth single from Porridge Radio’s upcoming second album Every Bad. The gift is small—a light-up novelty pen—and the transaction is awkward... Their songs are confessional, but without the meandering of a diary entry, made up of focused phrases rather than cluttered explanations....
Katie Crutchfield’s songs were once built for small spaces. She wrote her 2012 debut as Waxahatchee while snowed in at her parents’ home, and its sparse, self-recorded songs seemed designed to fill those intimate contours. And while her music has expanded far beyond, her upcoming fifth album, Saint Cloud, guides her toward even more open territory. “Lilacs,” the second single, is a folk song at heart...
“Garden Song” is an understated rumination on lost time and complicated nostalgia that features a video that opens with her ripping a bong in a bedroom. “When I grow up, I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life,” she sings, noting that she is none the wiser in this vision of the future...
Jessie Ware has always retained the spirit of an underdog. A powerful vocalist who could outsing most of her “alternative-soul” peers but declined to chase trends for the sake of a hit, Ware hit a career snag after her third album Glasshouse did disappointing numbers... Luckily, Ware didn’t heed her mother’s advice. “Spotlight”—the latest single from her forthcoming album What’s Your Pleasure?—begins with a sweeping orchestra that hints at adult-contemporary balladry before slipping into an understated boogie pocket. It drips with the hallmarks of a long-lost city pop classic; Ware’s sultry vocals, nearly a whisper, float atop beds of string flourishes and synthesizer swells courtesy of Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford...
...“Vanishing Twin,” the first cut from Mills’ forthcoming LP Mutable Set, lands between the aquatic layers of Look and his earlier two solo albums of singer-songwriter material. Though Mills co-wrote the song with Cass McCombs, its individual pieces—hushed murmurs, a fluid little melody, airy swipes of strings and sax—bear Mills’ subtle touch and even keel...
...For the follow-up to для FOR, her forthcoming LP Room for the Moon, she has reassessed the capabilities of her own voice, a careening and playful tool that previously fueled the Japanese city pop-inspired arrangements on her debut with heady dopamine rushes... While the chattering, spliced voices that bubbled up on для FOR between stretches of Buchla arrangements were more adornments than focal points, on “Sayonara,” the first single from her latest album, Shilonosova’s voice radiates brightly and takes surprising, sharp leaps that resemble a swooning Kate Bush. “Sayonara” is still cut through with Shilonosova’s precise touch, meticulously unfolding over angular guitar, tapping drums, and an imposing bassline...
Death is inevitable. This is the argument that was put forth by some as reason enough to halt the social distancing measures put in place to quell the spread of coronavirus. Wouldn’t it be better to get it over with now, they ask—to cull the weak so that those left alive might thrive?... Nick Hakim’s new single “QADIR” is named for his late friend, Qadir Imhotep West, who passed away in 2018 at age 25 and whose childhood portrait graces the cover. Over the span of seven and a half minutes, Hakim constructs a monument of sonics for his departed friend, building it with reverberant drums and peals of keyboard and flute...
Standing on the Corner are fastidious collagists at heart; the Brooklyn experimental ensemble stitches together far-flung samples, jazz instrumentation, and hip-hop beats into warped freeform suites. “Angel,” a punch-drunk interplanetary transmission anchored by a swooning, dazed vocal performance from the group’s architect Gio Escobar, is their first new single since 2017’s Red Burns...
Phoenix, Arizona isn’t known for being a hotbed of electronic music, but that hasn’t held back Kareem Ali. Ali’s productions bring together the futurist yearning of classic Detroit techno and the sentimental moods of true deep house, with forays into ambient, broken beat, and drum’n’bass... Like the best house productions, it’s dead simple. The core of the track is a one-bar loop of what might be R&B; the words are indistinct, chopped up in a way that seems to create a new, phantom word out of the two ends of a truncated sample.
...The title track from For You, their upcoming EP, is a perpetual motion machine powered by choppy disco cuts. Loose vocal threads—a refrain here, a passing phrase there—intertwine in a lattice of gleaming, high-tempo filter house. It evokes the raw ecstasy of the Roulé days of yore, making it all too easy to shut your brain off and let that looped sample deliver hit after hit of much-needed dopamine...
