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The best new tracks of this week, curated and chosen by Niall.
Sweeping Promises
Shooting Shadows
The Boston duo of Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug have been one of the more reliable sources of austere, minimal post-punk over the past few years – recorded fast, on cheap equipment, with no interest in making anything comfortable.
‘Shooting Shadows’ continues in that vein: with a track that sounds like it was overheard on a phone call – and it rocks. A little bit Sheer Mag.
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It’s from Sweeping Promises’ forthcoming Sub Pop album, their third, You Say I Romanticize is out August 14th.
Aldous Harding
One Stop
New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding is off-centre in the best sense – an idiosyncratic artist who I appreciate but don’t always step into.
Fifth album Train on the Island is up there with Harding’s best work to date so I’ve been dipping into her weird world more, and from it, ‘One Stop’ is characteristically hard to pin down – a sideways piece of piano-led pop that sounds completely casual and deliberate at the same time, and that part is intentional as the song reckons with the ease (One Stop is a chain of convenience shops in NZ) of showing yourself to an audience.
Kevin Morby
100,000
Little Wide Open is the just-released eighth album from the Kansas City songwriter Kevin Morby, this time around produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner. Where 2022’s This Is a Photograph took him to Memphis (that was a pod favourite), Little Wide Open brings Morby home to the Midwest.
Dessner’s fingerprints are present but the arrangements stay warm and in-the-room and characteristically Morby rather than slipping into prestige-indie polish.
Of the song Morby wrote on Substack:
” I’m always on some long solo drive across America. It’s my favourite hobby and while doing so I’m always enamoured in the small and somewhat nameless towns you pass off the side of the highway. Towns so small that it makes a mid sized midwestern city, like Kansas City, look like Oz.
I stop in these towns as often as possible. It reminds me a lot of my childhood, visiting extended family in Scottsbluff and Petersburg, Nebraska. I like to walk the desolate mainstrips and sit at bars and people watch and go on runs through the quiet neighborhoods that almost always stereotypically end up running alongside some train tracks. Salina, Kansas, Odessa and Amarillo, Texas, Jonesboro, Arkansas, etc. God bless you all. The glue that binds this crazy fucked up country together.
And so this is about those towns – the quiet lives taking place within and the nests of highways that tangle all around them, transporting people anywhere but there.”
Overmono
Lockup
I’ve already covered the album announcement but the single deserves its own moment. ‘Lockup’ arrived after Tom and Ed Russell fell down a rabbit hole reading Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again and ended up sampling cult Birmingham post-punk band Fast Relief. The result is exactly what you’d want from Overmono in 2026 – pummelling, chest-rattling, with tender chords buried underneath the abrasion. Pure Devotion is out August 7th.
Baby Rose
But NVM
The Washington DC singer has one of the most arresting voices in contemporary R&B – deep, weathered, the definition of a proper soul voice – her 2024 EP collaboration with BadBadNotGood was a hit around these parts.
‘But NVM’ is a piece of slow-burning soul that uses that voice exactly right – restrained until it needs to be loosened.
Baby Rose’s new album Yearnalism is out on July 10th on Secretly.
Other Songs I also recommend this week:
- The Difference Machine – ‘Orange Lazarus’
- Don Laka – ‘Stages’ (Prins Thomas Edit)
- Caroline Rose – ‘Yip Yip Yow’
- TEED – ‘Never Seen You Dance’
- Dua Selah – ‘Firestorm’
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Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
