That band you like is going to come back in style.

New music 14/04/25

If you take a quick look at the playlist this week you might wonder if I’ve decided to give up on new music. Stereolab? Pulp? As one Twin Peaks enthusiast might say to another, “that band you like is going to come back in style.”

Whatever the reasons are for so many bands suddenly touring again and releasing new albums — the fact that musicians don’t just stop being musicians because they get older, someone wants a new house, peak nostalgia times — it’s interesting having bands I loved, like Pulp and Stereolab, back with new music. In the case of both bands they haven’t strayed too far from what we know them for, with the biggest difference being simply experience, the thing that allows an artist to create using more colours. You can hear it in Cocker’s voice and in his lyrics and it makes me think of the two different recordings of Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell, one when she was 26 and one when she was 57. Same song, but it really might as well not be, her delivery and her voice are so changed. Personally I prefer the latter, and as I get a bit older I find it almost a relief to hear the aches in a voice, that everything that makes up a life, all that experience, good and bad, can be turned into something so beautiful. Your favorite old bands are on the playlist this week as well as some eye rolling girl power, a song about Dr Bronner’s soap and slow motion joy.

Spotify Playlist

Apple Music Playlist

While Stereolab have been touring together again for six years, I did not think we were going to see new music from them, but here we are - Stereolab are back after 15 years with a new single. They sound . . . exactly like themselves, a bright jumble of musical patterns, and why change when you’ve always been a band that sounded totally singular and unattached to a particular time.

“Ember Knight is an artist and you can decide what kind” is the bio on their Bandcamp page. Turns out it’s kind of hard to decide considering everything they do, but essentially Knight is building a multimedia world all of their own. They had a YouTube series called The Ember Knight Show, a feature film King of LA and in 2018 they released their debut album The Disappointment Cowboy which is somewhere between a stand-up special and a 40-minute orchestral piece and which paved the way for their rock opera, CHERYL. This latest single is quite literally her reading a Dr. Bronner’s Soap label and it’s a wonderful reminder of the incredible in the ordinary, that if you’re curious there’s always something interesting to be found, in this case “the bizarre and heartwarming tale of an immigrant genocide survivor leveraging the American marketplace to push his message of world peace.”