I am very delighted to be writing this because I have decided that this is the week where I just get to complain about music in yoga classes. Let me preface this by saying I think yoga is totally fine! I think it’s great for stretching and it’s good exercise and nice for the old mind and all that. The problem is just that when I find myself lying on a mat, as I did on Sunday, listening to that style of music I imagine is made by men who were popular in high school and then grew beards and bought a guitar I find myself getting a bit annoyed. When they are singing about forests and a girl called Emily I find myself becoming a little pissed off. And this is before the class has even started! This is just getting you ready for the sonic roller-coaster you are about to encounter! Then you are actually doing all your yoga poses and suddenly you find that you are hissing because you are being subjected to a very loud playlist called “tribal workout” and now you are muttering “this music” and clenching your fists and the then class is finally over, but not before you have listened to absolutely chilling piano music for relaxing! Now I am very sure there are many yoga studios that do not play music and where it’s quite lovely, but I do think there are also a lot of bad music yoga studios around and if you ever need to be reminded that music is important and can make you feel all sorts of ways you should just go to one of them or at least go to one of them with me and watch what happens!
Also one of the most fun music things I’ve come across in the last week is that there’s a new genre of music! Hit Em is a microgenre that was invented on Twitter last week by Drew Daniel from Matmos. I think it’s kind of a sweet story about how sometimes very, very nice creative things happen on the internet. You can read about it here.
Spotify Playlist
Apple Music Playlist
One of my favorite things to think about at the moment is the ultimate artist feature on a Charli XCX track. I am yet to come up with a perfect one, but I think it needs to be someone a bit unexpected. Like me. Also a fun game is thinking about which track from Brat you would like to be the guest artist on. Personally I would like a verse on “Everything is Romantic.” This is Billie Eilish’s first guest appearance on another artist’s song and it sounds like well known territory for her, a reminder of the darker beats of her debut album, but it’s still Charli’s song, whereas I felt “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” really became Lorde’s song. It’s got a couple of fun lines, the flirtatiously purred “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it,” and I’m really enjoying Billie Eilish wanting to make sure we are all aware that SHE LIKES GIRLS. It’s also interesting to see a superstar like Billie Eilish almost reverently follow Charli’s aesthetic lead here and the whole song is summed up by their conspiratorial giggling at the end.
I like a remix that renders the original reasonably unrecognisable, it turns it into a singular work, something that belongs to the remixer more than the creator and here Channel Tres does a very fine job making this feel completely his.
On this new track from the very good new album by Nigerian Songwriter Yemi Alade we have a real blending of styles and languages from across Africa. Of the album she says:
“I personally wanted to go back to the foundation of Afrobeats, which are sounds and genres that I listened to growing up as a kid. When my parents took me to family parties, there were certain melodies and guitar strums that I fell in love with. And I wanted to revisit those nostalgic moments and put it all in this album.”
You can really hear those moments on the album and on this bubbling song she melds Nigerian Afrobeats with South African amapiano while simultaneously drawing on South African-style choral harmonies, creating genre and country jumping magic.
Thurston Moore has always been the ultimate “a young man” to me. His whole vibe is pizza for breakfast and being able to drink a weird amount of coffee and then of course also being ironic and cooooool. I feel like I could have gotten badly trolled by Thurston Moore if we had ever hung out. Basically Thurston Moore — who I refuse to believe is now 66 and probably eats a very balanced breakfast and drinks a totally reasonable amount of coffee and who also seems entirely sincere and great — makes me very nervous. I’m convinced he would show me a picture of someone obscurely famous and be like “this is my mom when she was young, “ and then when I was like “ah what a nice picture,” he’d be like “you don’t know who this is lololol you’re such a loser.”
Have I just included this song because I want to talk about Irish people again!? No! I genuinely am delighted to finally have landed on a Kacey Musgraves song I like. But also Irish people, let’s go! I think mostly people know that an Irish goodbye is when you leave without saying goodbye. It’s quite a nice way to do things when you’re at say a 200 person wedding, but not good for a 10 person dinner party. In a move that could have come out of a Sabrina Carpenter song (they say it’s just your culture) the reason it’s called an Irish goodbye is apparently based on the stereotype that Irish people are prone to drinking a lot and so they’re just too drunk to say goodbye and I would like to counter this by saying that I have never met an Irish person who in any way thought they were too drunk to stop talking. This is a very lovely song set to a lilting, Irish-tinged waltz, with acoustic guitar picking and sparse piano lines.
This isn’t the first Erika de Casier and Nick León collaboration. On her album released earlier this year, something that felt like a bit of a 90’s tribute album, he co-wrote and produced the sultry, gentle track “Ex-Girlfriend.” We’re in totally different territory here, one false move and we could be dangerously close to something resembling eurodance, but this is far more sophisticated while still delivering a straight ahead hands up chorus.
I’m quite suspicious about covers, I very often just write them off and I’m going to blame movie trailers for this because they have in recent years really destroyed the cover song. We do not need another slowed down minor key version of any songs thank you Netflix! A good cover should really feel like it’s in conversation with the original, just adding enough to make it theirs, but doing it in a way that feels like a tribute rather than an attack. Here we have Empress Of paying tribute to this beautiful Margo Guryan song which takes its inspiration from “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Bach.
This track really shines from around 30 seconds in and then takes all sorts fun of unexpected little turns from around 2:10. All this makes up for them explaining the lyrics to it as “artificial intelligence won’t approximate humanity until it learns how to hate itself, ” which is the sort of thing you could try saying at parties to make sure no one ever wants to talk to you again.
This song is evidence that sometimes all you need is one great melodic idea and a beautiful voice and you have . . .a whole 4 minute song! It’s a repetitive song, but it works very well, building and rumbling like a storm. She has an astonishing voice that sounds like she’s chewed up decades and decades and also like she might have just been born.
Well I’m obviously going to compare this to Stereolab and what’s not to like about that? Peel Dream Magazine, whose name nods to the BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel — considered an arbiter of all things cool and underground — have a real knack for nostalgia and this song with it’s bubbling synths and occasionally wayward guitar feels like driving backwards in an old school bus.
This is one of the album’s I listened to in full over the weekend. It’s a confusing album, with really bleak standout tracks like this and then forays into pop that feel a little out of place alongside its darker more electronic landscape. She has a great voice for this type of work, secretive without whispering, soft without being weak.
JPEGMAFIA’s latest album is a well made, frantic and intense listen. The first 10 tracks left me feeling extremely weary-eared so it came as a surprise when it shifted into a more peaceful, introspective area. This track feels soft and enticing on an album that is abrupt and eccentric and is probably one of the most beautiful things he’s produced.
Well, well, well if it isn’t GEORGE. Aka I wanna dance with George, aka Charli XCX’s fiancee, aka the drummer from the 1975 here with his first solo track! It’s a jumpy, glitchy electro number which is being released through his also new label, dh2. I feel like he and Charli XCX are both quite dehaydrated and are also having more fun than anyone else in the world. Also very much enjoying her comment on a pic of the release, which was just: “ “Sexy, hot, 1 of a kind, legendary, talented, tall.”
I think this is the first grime track on the playlist! Yahoo! I really like the story of how Wiley tried to name the genre grime “eskibeat'“ (after his song Eskimo, which is considered one of the first grime tracks to ever be released). While I think eskibeat is a sick name for a genre (it is used to refer to a subgenre of grime), I do think grime is one of the most perfectly named genres in existence. Miss Angel is a Belgian artist and and this is the new single of her upcoming debut album.
Karen O and Danger Mouse released this elegant, often uneasy track last week marking their first song since their collaborative 2019 album Lux Prima. “Super Breath” delves into a rocky relationship marked by unfulfilled love. Karen O does wonders with a word, with little choices like the pronunciation of tears as t-ears sung in her super styled silver crunch of a voice.
This is a rework of the 1987 hit “Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S. In a press release, Dan Snaith explained:
“‘Pump Up the Volume’ was the first time in my life I heard electronic music—sitting in front of the family stereo system listening to the top 40 countdown on the radio when I was a kid. It completely blew my mind—it sounded like something from another world. It’s stuck with me ever since—I always wanted to rework it in some way. I didn’t consciously think about it when I started working on my track but I think there’s something really special about having gone right back to the very beginning in making this.”
Shara Nova, who records as My Brightest Diamond, has a voice like wind over a moor and to me this is her at her best and most comfortable, totally stripped back letting her voice carry everything. It’s a beautiful song which reflects on the worst moments in a life and the feeling of being connected to something bigger than oneself during them.
This is quite a different pick, a lot more ambient and experimental than most of the songs I put on this playlist. I just find it quite mesmerizing when it kicks in at around 1 minute, listening to it feels like the closest I am going to get to a sort of meditative experience.