Every week, the Nialler9 Spotify Weekly Playlist is updated with new music, and in this corner, we share the playlist and highlight some some select songs from the list below.
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See the homepage for all Spotify playlists: New Music | Irish | Monthly
1.
Baby Keem
First Order Of Business
Kendrick’s cousin dropped a debut album The Melodic Blue last Friday. The Kendrick-featuring ‘Family Ties’ is still the best thing on it despite the meme-worth King Kenny ‘top of da mornin’ line on ‘Range Brothers’.
After his feature on Donda, there’s a lot more to come from Baby Keem and ‘First Order Of Business’ with its story about Keem buying his grandma a house, has a heart to it that is rare.
2.
Little Simz, Obonjayar
Point and Kill
Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert is one of the finest albums released this month so far. It’s been hard to pick a favourite track from it but this is my current highlight.
3.
Lonely Guest, Tricky, Kway
On A Move
Pre-order it here, before release on October 22nd.
4.
Low
White Horses
Low are one of those bands I know are great but I really don’t give them the time, and have only sporadically dipped in since their glut of great albums in the early 2000s. Thanks to Séamus in the Nialler9 Discord (access via Patreon) for reminding me to listen to their new album Hey What, which opens with this metallic industrial melodic boom.
It’s hard not to stay impressed at Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s continuous lack of settling into old musical age.
5.
Richard Fearless
Our Acid House
The former Death In Vegas man goes long with a track taken from a companion album Future Rave Memory (digital November 5th / vinyl December 8th) to his 2019 album Deep Rave Memory. ‘Our Acid House’ is a sprawling 15-minute track that holds its gaze.
The album is inspired by Fearless’ Metal Box studio surroundings in London.
“Metal Box, my studio, is located where the River Lea converges with the Thames, near East India Docks; it’s a Ballardian landscape, which constantly inspires. ‘Tamas’, the opening song, is a Sanskrit word that means darkness, which some believe is the origin of the name Thames.
On my way to the studio I pass some of the most deprived areas of London, many of which sit under the gaze of the financial center of Canary Wharf. I cycle under shadows cast by colossal data storage buildings that feed the corporate machine of the Docklands.
I think of the East India Company and the events their activities set in motion. When the wind is right, I smell the Tate & Lyle Factory downstream and contemplate the trans-Atlantic slave trade that fed this country’s love of those white crystals. On the other side of the Thames is the Millennium Dome, hovering mostly idle apart from the billboards flashing ads in unison after dark.
I hear the constant screeching of metal-on-metal from the adjacent steel factory, and the drone of flights to and from City Airport. I sit among their ambience, feeling the pulse of the city, with the dark water a constant presence. The energy from this junction where two tidal rivers collide is powerful; it seems to heal. I think of the German word ‘Strom’, which means the flow of electricity, the flow of water.”
‘Future Rave Memory’ is a dystopian ambient album and work of modernist meditation set firmly in an era when humanity is reckoning with its outsized place in the natural world, a process which may evoke humility, defiance, denial or despair.
Richard Fearless
6.
Telefís
We Need (Jape remix)
A Jape remix is always worth adding to the rotations.
His latest is a remix of a song we premiered here a few months ago from Telefís (aka Jacknife Lee and Cathal Coughlan).
The duo’s debut album A hÁon which is scheduled for release in January 2021
7.
Lisa Hannigan, Crash Ensemble
MCMXIV
Lisa Hannigan here using her voice as a high-pitched texture to Crash Ensemble’s instrumentation.
The track is from the album IN THE ECHO: Field Recordings from Earlsfort Terrace, an 8-track track concept compilation album on Ergodos also featuring Lisa O’Neill, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Katie Kim, Seán Mac Erlaine, Paul Noonan, Conor O’Brien and lots more.
The album is released Thursday 30th September 2021, and was produced by Ross Turner.
“The title ‘MCMXIV’ refers to the year 1914, which is the year the grandiose façade and entrance to the [National Concert Hall] building was built. If looking at the front of the building you can see MCMXIV written in stone.The recording of this piece took place in a large space directly above the front entrance, and above the Kevin Barry Room – the historic room in which the 1922 Dáil Éireann debates on ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty took place.
I believe the piece captures a mood and tone that is timeless and almost haunted by what had come a century before. It was a privilege to witness and be amongst the eight musicians exploring and complimenting each other as they did.”
Ross Turner.
8.
Oneohtrix Point Never, Liz Frazer
Tales From The Trash Stratum
Oneohtrix Point Never dropped this collaboration with Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins) to mark a special expanded Blu-ray Edition of last year’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never album, which is released a year on from the original.
It features spatial audio Dolby Atmos mixes, which also includes the recent Rosalia collab.
9.
SUUNS
The Trilogy
Delightfully off-kilter music from Suuns’ new album The Witness.
“This song best represents the patience that we allowed ourselves on The Witness, our willingness to let things unfold on their own accord without pushing too much,” says O’Neill. “The mandate with ‘The Trilogy’ was to set up a groove that feels good, and then not do anything, which gives the song the endless feeling around which to sing about history and the future, complacency and patience.”
Check out my other favourite new tracks in the playlist below:
Nialler9 Weekly Playlist:
