The 10 best tracks of the week
See the last page for a Soundcloud playlist of all the tracks. Looking for more new music? Follow the Nialler9 New Music playlist on Spotify. Updated weekly.
1. All Tvvins – ‘Thank You’
A giant-killing new single from the Irish duo.
Conor Adams and Lar Kaye aka All Tvvins dropped their big new track ‘Thank You’ whch has an eighties-production sheen like Aha and a bassline gliding along with Adams asking “do you want to be a cold cold killer? / do you want to be a cold operator?,” in a cathartic manner that is matched by the tightly-arranged emotion. This is a song with big potential.
It’s released on Warner UK and is out now on iTunes and Spotify.
2. Hot Chip – ‘Huarache Lights’
Why Make Sense? is the band’s sixth album out in May.
When I think of Hot Chip, I think of music that’s calibrated to make people dance and whether the band’s Owen Clarke, particularly can do his ridiculous dancing to it on stage. For their first song in three years or so, ‘Huarache Lights’ exceeds that criteria with some deep synth grooves driving the song with some typical Alexis Taylor vocals morphing into some Kraftwerk-vocoder vibes.
It’s the opening track on Why Make Sense?, the band’s sixth album on Domino out on May 15th.
3. Florence + The Machine – ‘What Kind Of Man’
A passionate stomping return for Ms. Welch.
After teasing How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, her new album with an intro title song that came with a video of her dancing with a clone, Florence + The Machine has debuted ‘What Kind Of Man’, her first single from the album due on Friday May 29th (ireland), June 1st (UK) on Island Records.
The somewhat NSFW video for the song a dramatic, long affair, directed by Vincent Haycock. The song is a good old-fashioned Florence stomp with Welch delivering an impassioned vocal at her strongest with some brass uplifting the passion (on the record they are arranged by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp).
The album was produced by by Markus Dravs who has recently worked with Arcade Fire and Little Green Cars. Contributions also come from Paul Epworth, Kid Harpoon and John Hill.
The song is available for download, the album is on pre-order.
4. Kendrick Lamar – ‘The Blacker The Berry’
A searing politically-charged song about race.
After the pleasing positivity of ‘i’, Kendrick delivers a counter. ‘The Blacker The Berry’ has him seething with anger and at boiling point. “You hate me don’t you?/ You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture,” he says to racial haters but Kendrick also turns the anger on himself, calling himself a hypocrite. As the writer Michael Chabon annotated on Genius, Kendrick’s hypocrisy is that he “grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man”.
5. Alabama Shakes – ‘Future People’
The band return with a new album and a bigger, better sound.
The problem with penning a towering achievement of a song like ‘Hold On’, a catchy yet simple blues-soul rock’n’roll song is that it overshadowed everything else including the album Boys & Girls that Alabama Shakes did after that. That may just me though, the album did sell in the millions.
Time apart from that birthing moment is a good thing and the band return with a second album Sound & Color on Rough Trade on April 21st and something else is happening that the band are calling “genre-bending”. They might be right too as both new tracks shared from the album demonstrate. Brittany Howard goes for a falsetto vocal and the band match it with some taut funk-rock encased in an almighty production that sound like the first time you pressed the bass-boost button on your stereo.
6. Young Wonder – ‘Intergalactic’
The Cork duo go interplanetary with a new track.
Young Wonder, Ian Ring and Rachel Koeman, are back with new music and hints of a debut album called Birth to follow up their first couple of EPs.
‘Intergalactic’ is an airy slow song that revels in the atmosphere it creates. Fitting for the title, it’s as if the band are peering out at the cosmos and relating it to the personal – “feel the rocky planet move / just for us,” Koeman sings.
7. Fort Romeau & New Jackson – ‘Not A Word’
A collab from Fort Romeau’s new album Insides.
‘Not A Word’ has David Kitt’s imprint all over it, a night-time house groove with synths growing around the arrangement, with vocoder vocals and a switch-up into a digital funk bassline as notes cascade towards the end of the track.
8. GOODTIME -‘Did You Even Notice?’
Jape and I Am The Cosmos-assist on this beautifully drifting single.
Goodtime’s 2011 solo album The Colours Of Darkness was in my opinion, an under-rated gem. It bore further fruit in remix form too. John Cowhie most recently teamed up with Diamond Dagger as Chrystyne, a psychedelic electro project, from which there will likely be more music.
Good news today for The Colours Of Darkness fans, a new Goodtime album is coming on the RITE Label and ‘Did You Even Notice?’, a cold wind of a song with drum machines and synths rolling along. The track features from I Am The Cosmos‘ Ross Turner and Cian Murphy, Glenn Keating & Richie Egan (Jape) and was recorded in Malmo.
The video for the track is a collaboration with Scotland’s John B. McKenna and based on Herbert Ponting’s 1910 photographs of a tragic Antarctica expedition. The song is out now on Bandcamp.
9. Diet Cig – ‘Scene Sick’
Upstate New York duo’s bright and brief pop song.
Diet Cig, Alex Luciano and Noah Bowman signed up to Father/Daughter Records (home to Pure Bathing Culture) to release their debut EP Over Easy.
The EP is five-tracks of fun and melodic lo-fi pop punk music and the video for the track ‘Scene Sick’, a song which addresses the self-importance of musicians in a band matches that visually in the opposite way, with Alex dancing along in cute fashion that trivialises all other music further.
10. Meltybrains? – ‘Donegal’
A wistful ambient single from the experimental Dublin band.
Back in November , Meltybrains? gave us ‘IV’ a track which distilled all of the eclectic ambience and electronic melodics that have made them a go-see band in the last year.
The A-side ‘Donegal’ is with us now, and far from being some concise three-minute pop banger, true to Meltybrains? form it builds over a nonsensical lyric – “I can not even say” with cascading brass notes, percussion and synths interlocking in a wistful nostalgic manner that sounds like a post-rock band covering drum and bass from Goldie’s Timeless album or an early DJ Shadow cut.
Both tracks are released on fancy vinyl next week via Rough Trade.
Tracks of the Week playlist
More new music? Follow the Nialler9 New Music playlist on Spotify. Updated weekly.
