The 5 best songs of the week

Turnstile

Never Enough

Baltimore hardcore band are back after four years with their next wave of euphoric punk rock music, an album called Never Enough, echoing the sound of the band’s breakthrough 2021 album Glow On – that means widescreen production, uplifting breakdowns, and shiny reverb. Their sound fees like a harder-edged Jane’s Addiction.

The album was produced by singer Brendan Yates and the music video was directed by Yates and guitarist Pat McCrory. Meg Mills has joined the band on guitar, alongside existing members Franz Lyons (Bass), and Daniel Fang (Drums).

2hollis

nice

It took me a couple of goes to recognise the sample of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs’ ‘Household Goods’ on this track from the internet rapper and producer du jour Hollis Frazier-Herndon aka 2hollis, as heard on the just-released fourth album star.

The album is filled with this kind of subgenre trap / 8-bit hyperpop / club bass / hooky dance pop, that feels inevitable to catapult the long-standing underground producer to a greater consciousness.

Indopan (The Cyclist), Elaine Howley

Antigreed

Andrew Morrison is best known as The Cyclist or Buz Ludzha but has just released a 70-minute album from his Indopan moniker called In Opulence, a suite of “jazzy kinetics, lysergic breaks, and dusted swing” inspired by a recent analogue instrument hall (Wurlitzer 206A, Korg Polysix, and an analog Soviet drum brain called the Marsh UDS).

While the rest of his music is known for its “tape-throb” feel, Indopan is more spiritually minded, and two songs on the record feature the voice of Cork’s Elaine Howley (‘Shore Ellipsis’ and ‘Antigreed’).

The latter’s textured atmospherics are a particularly suitable match for Howley’s expressive meditative vocal chords, but the whole release is worthy of warm exploration.

Ella Hunt

Subway Trash

Fiona Apple meets Black Country New Road immediately sprung to mind hearing ‘Subway Trash’ from the 26-year-old singer, songwriter, and NYC-based actress Ella Hunt (you may have seen her lately in the SNL film Saturday Night) from Devon now based in NYC.

‘Subway Trash’ is a piano ballad grappling with feminine ideals and reflects growing up in an art-obsessed household (Hunt was born to figurative sculptor mother and an art dealer/curator dad).

The self-directed video recreates the classic nude reclining painting poses, with particular emphasis on Velasquez’s masterpiece ‘The Rokeby Venus’ and the Helmut Newton photograph of the same title.

“Subway trash is a song about the male gaze and my relationship as a woman in the entertainment industry (and honestly as a woman full stop!) with the male gaze industrial complex; it’s about reinvention and shape shifting to fit the desires of others; it’s about the exhausting cycle of seeking approval or validation or desire from the ever shifting plate of societal expectations and ideals of womanhood.”

Frankie Cosmos

Vanity

New York band Frankie Cosmos will release a sixth album Different Talking on June 27th on Sub Pop, and I adore the bright and propulsive lead single ‘Vanity’.

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Greta Kline says of the song:

  “I started writing it one evening while I walked (~6.5 miles) from Tompkins Square Park to Sunset Park, speaking directly to the universe and pleading to be considered by it,” says Kline. “It feels like it encompasses this push and pull between adult and kid, government and governed, planet and blade of grass.”