10 new songs to love this week

Marika Hackman

No Caffeine

Originally released in September, ‘No Caffeine’ got a renewed focus in the last week as part of the album experience of English singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist’s fourth record Big Sigh.

While the sound of the song and production are gently comforting, the song has a darker meaning beneath the surface, in that it’s a list of things to do in an attempt to avoid a panic attack and the relentlessness of anxiety, while imagining the perspective of a toxic relationship.

Joy Orbison

Flight FM

Get that bass wobble into you.

Joy Orbison has released a few minimal maximal club bangers lately, and ‘Flight FM’ is another of those tracks that takes over the brain’s flux capacitor. Big fun.

Joy O takes to the booth of Centre Point on Saturday February 4th this year.

Chelsea Wolfe

Everything Turns Blue

Chelsea Wolfe has announced her new album She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is out February 9th on Loma Vista.

‘Everything Turns Blue’ is the dank-gilded fourth track from the record so far. I also featured ‘Dusk’ last year.

English Teacher

Albert Road

I’ve loved everything from Leeds indie band English Teacher so good news today then that the band’s debut album This Could Be Texas is out April 12th via Island Records.

‘Albert Road’ was released today, a curtain-closer of a track, a track about intolerant people emboldened post-Brexit  and singer/ lyricist Lily Fontaine’s mixed raced upbringing in a small town:

“When people ask where I’m from I usually say I’m mixed race: half Yorkshire, half Lancashire. It allows me to divert with comedy from the potential connotations of that question, which change wildly depending on who’s asking it. One end of Albert Road in Colne [her hometown] is cold, underfunded and uninspiring; the other is warm at night with live music. It sums up how I look back on the place I lived for 19 years.”

“But don’t take their prejudice to heart
They hate everyone
The world around them never showed
How loving can be fun.”

The band announced a load of European and UK dates including:

21st May – Ulster Sports Club, Belfast
22nd May – Whelans, Dublin

Villagers

That Golden Time

Conor O’Brien has announced the sixth Villagers album That Golden Time is out on May 10th on Domino.

The followup to the Villagers album Fever Dreams, takes its title from the song of the same name – “I wanted the warmth of the record reflected in its title,” says O’Brien. “The song also touches on a theme that keeps cropping up, of romanticism versus realism. How can you have aspirational ideas about yourself and the world around you, whilst being confronted with a harsh, cold reality? The friction interested me.”

The album is largely a O’Brien solo endeavour, with guests Dónal Lunny [Planxty, The Bothy Band] on bouzouki, songwriter Peter Broderick on violin, and a group of players that O’Brien had first seen performing in a tribute to one of his great loves, Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who added soprano vocal, viola and cello.

Villagers announce new album That Golden Time; hear the title track

Anwar Highsign, Arckatron, Castle

Kids Don’t Feel

Philadelphia MC/producer Anwar HighSign and LA-based producer/composer Arckatron collab on this headnodding rap cut (with rapper Castle), discovered via Marc Weidenbaum’s This Week in Sound Substack.

That bassline dragging on the floor of the track is sticky like frost ice.

Jayson Green & The Jerk

Local Jerk

DFA is back in the disco business with this metropolitan disco glass-clinking bar cut.

IDLES

Gift Horse

Khraungbin

A Love International

As was pointed out to me earlier this week, Khruangbin sound like how a lava lamp looks and you don’t really need anything else from me today.

The Texas trio will release their first album in four years on April 5th through Dead Oceans.