Taylor Swift has shared the first music video from her album Midnights. It’s for the third track, ‘Anti-Hero’, which, like most of the new record, was written and co-produced by Swift and Jack Antonoff. Swift also wrote and directed the clip for ‘Anti-Hero’, which sees her reckoning with the various insecurities she lays out in the song. Watch it below.
Ahead of Midnights‘ release, Swift shared a teaser trailer for a series of “music movies” accompanying the album, confirming that they will feature appearances from Laura Dern, Antonoff, HAIM, John Early, Mike Birbiglia, and Dita von Teese. The trailer premiered during this week’s Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the visuals reunited Swift with cinematographer Rina Yang, who worked on her All Too Well short film last year. “I love storytelling, I love songwriting, I love writing videos, I love directing them,” Swift said in a statement. “And this was a really fun opportunity to work again with the cinematographer Rina Yang.”
She added: “I’m really proud of what we made and I really hope you like them. We worked with some amazing actors, which you’ll find out more about at the end of the teaser trailer,” she continued to tease.
Just hours after the release of her new album Midnights, Taylor Swift has shared the ‘3AM Edition’ of the record. It features seven additional tracks that were conceived during the making of the album, including three – ‘The Great War’, ‘High Infidelity’, and ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’ – that feature the National’s Aaron Dessner. ‘High Infidelity’ also credits Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia as a contributor. Listen to it below.
On social media, Swift wrote: “Surprise! I think of Midnights as a complete concept album, with those 13 songs forming a full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour. However! There were other songs we wrote on our journey to find that magic 13. I’m calling them 3am tracks. Lately I’ve been loving the feeling of sharing more of our creative process with you, like we do with From The Vault tracks. So it’s 3am and I’m giving them to you now.”
Swift also appeared on the latest episode of New Music Daily on Apple Music, where she discussed the meaning of her song ‘Karma’. “So one of the themes about Midnights is how you’re feeling in the middle of the night and that can be intense self-hatred you go through these very polarizing emotions when you’re up late at night and you’re brain just spirals, it can spiral downward or it can spiral way up and you can just be really feeling yourself,” she said.
“‘Karma’ is written from a perspective of feeling like really happy really proud of the way you life is, feeling like this must be a reward for doing stuff right and it’s a song that I really love because I think we all need some of those moments you know we can’t just be beating ourselves up all the time,” she continued. “You have to have these moments where you’re like you know what karma is my boyfriend and that’s it.”
Norway’s Sløtface have returned with a new single called ‘Happy’. It comes alongside the announcement of a new EP that’s due out in February next year and will include the recent double A-side ‘Beta / Come Hell Or Whatever’. Check out ‘Happy’ via the accompanying lyric video below.
Earlier this year, Sløtface announced that Lasse and Tor-Arne would be leaving the group leaving to focus on other projects. Haley Shea, who now leads the band, said of the new single and EP in a press release:
For this upcoming EP the main themes I’ve been exploring are really joy, happiness and all of the opposites of these feelings – what it means to feel happy or content. “Happy” is one of the first songs we finished writing together with the new band who perform the Sløtface songs live and also contribute on most of the recorded music. Tobias, our guitarist, came up with the riff, and he, Nils, Marie, Simen and I just jammed around that in the rehearsal space, which was a positive change after working in a studio setting for a lot of the other new Sløtface songs.
Lyrically, the song is very direct, simple and honest. I was working on how to write about the themes of the EP and thought I’d try saying it as simply as I could. I truly do just want to feel happy. And after a few years of soul searching as to what that could mean, this felt like the most direct way to express those feelings.
Burial has surprise-released a new ambient EP titled Streetlands (via Hyperdub). Clocking in at 34 minutes, the three-track project follows January’s Antidawn EP. Listen to it below.
Last year, Burial put out Shock Power of Love, his split EP with London-based producer Blackdown.
Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, is out now. Most of the LP’s songs were written and recorded with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. “Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past,” Swift wrote on social media. “Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like Midnights.” In addition to Lana Del Rey, who appears as a featured guest on ‘Snow on the Beach’, Midnights features contributions from Zoë Kravitz, William Bowery (aka Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn), Jahaan Sweet (known for his work with Kendrick Lamar), and Antonoff’s Red Hearse bandmates Sam Dew and Sounwave.
Arctic Monkeys are back with a new album, The Car, out now via Domino. The follow-up to 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino includes the advance singles ‘There’d Better Be a Mirrorball’, ‘Body Paint’, and ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’. The LP was produced by James Ford and recorded at Butley Priory in Suffolk, La Frette in Paris, and RAK Studios in London. Its cover artwork was shot by drummer Matt Helders. “It’s not so much to do with becoming technically better,” frontman Alex Turner said of the album in press materials. “It’s perhaps about singing in a way that’s more in tune with what you’re trying to express deep down which sometimes the words can almost get in the way of.” Read our review of The Car.
Dry Cleaning have followed up their 2021 debut New Long Leg with a new album, Stumpwork, which was once again recorded with producer John Parish, this time at Rockfield Studios. It was preceded by the singles ‘Don’t Press Me’, ‘Anna Calls From the Arctic’, ‘Gary Ashby’, and ‘No Decent Shoes for Rain’. “I wrote about the things that preoccupied me over this period, like loss, masculinity, feminism, my mum, being separated from my partner for little stretches in the lockdown, lust,” vocalist Florence Shaw explained in press materials. “There were two murders of women in London that were extensively covered on the news, and the specific details of one of those murders were reported on whilst we were at Rockfield. That coverage influenced some of my writing and my state of mind.” Read our review of Stumpwork.
Carly Rae Jepsen has returned with her new album The Loneliest Time, out now via 604/Schoolboy/Interscope. On the new LP, which follows 2019’s Dedicated and its accompanying Side B, Jepsen collaborated with Rostam Batmanglij, Tavish Crowe, Bullion, Captain Cuts, John Hill, Kyle Shearer, and Alex Hope. “I’m quite fascinated by loneliness. It can be really beautiful when you turn it over and look at it,” Jepsen wrote in a statement. “Just like love, it can cause some extreme human reactions.” The singles ‘Talking to Yourself’, ‘Beach House’, ‘Western Wind’, and the Rufus Wainwright-featuring title track arrived ahead of the release.
I Love to Lie is the official studio debut by Lowertown, the duo of Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg. Out now via Dirty Hit, the follow-up to the group’s The Gaping Mouth EP was previewed by the singles ‘Bucktooth’, ‘Antibiotics’, and ‘No Way’. The album was recorded with Catherine Marks (Foals, St. Vincent, Manchester Orchestra, Wolf Alice) in London. “I just want each album to feel good or better than the last,” Osby said in press materials. “I want to keep surprising people and pushing the weirdness of the music. Hopefully, they’ll stick with us.”
Frankie Cosmos have put out their latest album, Inner World Peace, via Sub Pop. Following 2019’s Close It Quietly, the record was produced by the band, Nate Mendelsohn, and Katie Von Schleicher at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn. “To me, the album is about perception,” bandleader Greta Kline commented in a statement. “It’s about the question of ‘Who am I?’ and whether or not the answer matters. It’s about quantum time, the possibilities of invisible worlds. The album is about finding myself floating in a new context. A teenager again, living with my parents. An adult, choosing to live with my family in an act of love. Time propelled us forward, aged us, and also froze. If you don’t leave the house, who are you to the world? Can you take the person you discover there out with you?”
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn have collaborated on the full-length project Pigments, out now via Merge. “I felt like the tools that I and other people like me were dealt weren’t shiny,” Richard explained in a statement. “Yet we still painted these beautiful pictures. This album is what it means to be a dreamer and finally reach a place where you’ve decided to love the pigments that you have.” Pigments is a tribute to Richard’s father Frank Richard, who was the lead singer of the funk band Chocolate Milk. “The point is that we’re going through the same thing in different ways,” Richard added. “No matter what walks of life we come from, the story can be similar.”
Tegan and Sara have issued their 10th studio album and first for Mom+Pop, Crybaby. The Canadian twin duo co-produced the LP with John Congleton and recorded it at Studio Litho in Seattle and LA’s Sargent Recorders. “This was the first time where, while we were still drafting our demos, we were thinking about how the songs were going to work together,” Tegan said in a press release. “It wasn’t even just that Sara was making lyric changes or reorganizing the parts to my songs, it was that she was also saying to me, ‘This song is going to be faster,’ or ‘It’s going to be in a different key.’ But Sara effectively improves everything of mine that she works on.” Sara added: “Maybe I am the renovator. I’m the house-flipper of the Tegan and Sara band.”
Pinkshift have dropped their debut album, Love Me Forever, today via Hopeless. It was recorded by Will Yip and includes the early singles ‘nothing (in my head)’, ‘i’m not crying, you’re crying’, ‘Get Out’, and ‘in a breath’. “We were concerned this wouldn’t feel like an actual album, but because we all worked on it together throughout this period of time, it feels really cohesive,” vocalist Ashrita Kumar shared in a statement. “It defines an era of our lives.” Drummer Myron Houngbedji added: “With everything that’s going on – both in the world and in our own lives – it feels like it was a very transitional period that influenced what we were writing about. They all have similar themes.”
Nick Hakim has released COMETA, the follow-up to 2020’s WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, via ATO Records. The album features the singles ‘Happen’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘M1’, and ‘Feeling Myself’, as well as collaborations with DJ Dahi, Helado Negro, and Arto Lindsay. Talking about the themes of the album, Hakim said in a press release: “The key is to find that extremity of love for yourself. It’s about growing into someone you want to be; it’s about finding pure love within yourself when the world around us seems to be crumbling.” He added, “I think it’s nice to have love in your life and to have people that are sharing and wanting that. It’s my interpretation of a really romantic way to express love in my own way.”
Other albums out today:
Archers of Loaf, Reason in Decline; Alice Boman, The Space Between; Wiki & Subjxct 5, Cold Cuts; Bibio, BIB10; The Soft Pink Truth, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?; Brutus, Unison Life; Hagop Tchaparian, Bolts; Sloan, Steady; Rubblebucket, Earth Worship; Goat, Oh Death; Ariel Zetina, Cyclorama; Simple Minds, Direction of the Heart; Shutups, I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit; uji, Timebeing; Their / They’re / There, Their / They’re / There; Witch Fever, Congregation; Whitmer Thomas, The Older I Get the Funnier I Was; a-ha, True North; Twain, Noon; Persher, Man With the Magic Soap; Architects, The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit; Robyn Hitchcock, Shufflemania!; Jade Imagine, Cold Memory; Exhumed, To the Dead; Meghan Trainor, TAKIN’ IT BACK; Dego, Love Was Never Your Goal; Flore Laurentienne, Volume II; Armani Caesar, THE LIZ 2; Clarice Jensen, Esthesis; Nina Gala, swan heart; Cate Kennan, The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams.
Joni Mitchell is set to play her first headline concert in 23 years. The folk icon will take the stage at Washington’s Gorge Amphitheatre June 20, 2023, marking her first publicly announced headline set since she toured with Herbie Hancock in 2000.
Brandi Carlile, who joined Mitchell druing her surprise set at this year’s Newport Folk Festival, revealed the news on last night’s The Daily Show. “She said, ‘I want to play again.’… Joni Mitchell is going to play,” Carlile told Trevor Noah. “No one’s been able to buy a ticket to see Joni Mitchell play in 20 years.”
Since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015, Mitchell has been holding private ‘Joni Jams’ for years, which has played a crucial role in her recovery, according to Carlile. She also said that the other musicians who performed at the Newport Folk set didn’t know Mitchell was planning to sing live that day. “We thought it was a jam,” Carlile told Noah. “We didn’t know that she was going to sing all the leads on those songs. She just started singing. We had rehearsed the songs ourselves, and we didn’t know whether we should stop or what we should do, you know, so we just sang with her.”
“She always has a plan,” she added. “She knows what she wants to do, even if she doesn’t say it.”
The C.I.A. – the band made up of Ty Segall, his wife Denée Segall, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly – have announced their latest LP, Surgery Channel. It’s set to drop on January 20 via In the Red. Lead single ‘Impersonator’ arrives alongside a music video co-directed by Joshua Erkman and Denée Segall. Check it out below.
The C.I.A’s self-titled debut album came out in 2018. Its follow-up was written in 2021 and recorded with Mike Kriebel at Segall’s own Harmonizer Studios. Ty Segall released his most recent solo record, “Hello, Hi”, back in July.
Surgery Channel Cover Artwork:
Surgery Channel Tracklist:
1. Introduction
2. Better
3. Inhale Exhale
4. Impersonator
5. Surgery Channel Pt. I
6. Surgery Channel Pt. II
7. Bubble
8. You Can Be Here
9. The Wait
10. Construct
11. Under
12. Over
On The Car, Arctic Monkeys’ seventh studio album, Alex Turner can still be found wandering in a haze. It’s been four years since the release of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and both the mood and scenery have shifted: that album’s elaborate framework, at once cosmic and intimate, seems to have slowly faded away, tearing a hole through the heart of the band’s spacey, enigmatic lounge pop. Stylistically, Turner and company still use a lot of the same tricks: fragmented narration, sumptuous arrangements, cryptic metaphors, and a vague sentimentality for a past that’s long gone, their combined effect sometimes elevating but more often clouding the drama unraveling beneath the surface. The new album doesn’t sound grounded – if anything, it confirms that the airy, elusive space its predecessor immersed itself in was less a one-time experiment than a kind of new home base.
But you get why Turner, in characteristically ambiguous fashion, has branded it their “return to Earth.” (Last time a much-anticipated album was framed as such, we got an hour-long fungus-themed record about motherhood, so always take that statement with a grain of salt.) As convoluted and obtuse as his lyricism can be, the veneer is no longer impenetrable – there’s a sense that we’re getting closer to the core of things rather than venturing further into the stratosphere. If this all sounds fairly abstract, that’s still how the songwriting comes across. You’ll have trouble following Turner’s train of thought, because, well, his characters, too, are left wondering where they are and how they got here; they drift from one place to the next but seem to not move at all, clinging onto old obsessions and new fantasies, disillusioned and stuck in a life of opulent mundanity where the cracks are finally starting to show. Lead single ‘There’d Better Be a Mirrorball’ is as lush and cinematic as the album gets, but any glint of romance is overshadowed by a sweeping melancholy that goes on to infuse much of the album.
Throughout The Car, Turner weaves and grinds his voice around words that don’t often carry the same elegance or weight, an incongruousness that points to an untrustworthy narrator whose most glamorous performances belie deception. He has the power to command a whole orchestra with chilling ease, but seemingly no control over how the truth comes out, even when he’s the one to spell it out. There is a song called ‘Mr. Schwartz’ that presents itself like a strange character study, yet every detail becomes background noise for the weighty realization that it’s “as fine a time as any to deduce the fact that neither you or I has ever had a clue.”
If these retro-tinged songs mirrored the structure of the ones they’re modeled after, such revelations would be at the center of any given track. Instead, they creep along the edges of songs overflowing with absurd non-sequiturs and sly jokes that aim to distract from the emotional debris that’s scattered throughout. Over the eerie march of ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’, Turner imagines “performing in Spanish on Italian TV sometime in the future/ Whilst wondering if your mother still ever thinks of me,” only to be met by silence and the challenge of a much more unsettling question: “Is that vague sense of longing kinda trying to cause a scene?” ‘Body Paint’ also opens with an attempt at witty humour (“For a master of deception and subterfuge you’ve made yourself quite the bed to lie in”), but it grows into one of the most subtly devastating tracks on The Car, an epic ballad of betrayal you can easily trace in Turner’s aching falsetto.
The record begins with a taunt – “Don’t get emotional/ That ain’t like you” – and it’s in the songs with the least amount of action that that emotion leaks out, like the wrenching guitar solo that bleeds through the languid title track. Although the album sounds sublime, adorned by strings that naturally give it a luxurious, velvety sheen, there’s also an aspect of the music that feels deliberately drained of colour. Even the unexpectedly vibrant, funky ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ reeks of a certain stiffness, which is in line with references to “blank expressions” and “awkward silences” but ends up feeling inconsequential; ‘Hello You’ is bold enough to evoke an AM riff, stripping away all the swagger to suit the song’s nostalgic narrative, but fails to push it forward.
It seems inevitable, maybe even part of the point, that The Car would leave something to be desired. It’s an album that hints at vulnerability but never really opens its arms to it, always getting somewhere – getting emotional – to avoid being in one place. Which might be exactly what the band was going for, and to a large extent, it works: it’s a consistently evocative record and a dazzling mystery to unpack. But what can you do – how much can you evoke when the façade that’s about to break only reveals more of an empty, disjointed thread? Do you patch it back up and try to get the engine running? On The Car, Arctic Monkeys seem to be on their way to figuring out – or maybe this is just an oddly perfect goodbye, question mark still flying in the air.
Chicago-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Macie Stewart (of Finom, formerly known as Ohmme) has released a new track called ‘Defeat’. It comes alongside a video directed Sid Branca. Check it out below.
“’Defeat’ is about confronting overextension and overcommitment,” Stewart said in a statement. “Sometimes you say yes so many times- to work, to hangs, to relationships, that you cease to bring your best in all those avenues. I think it can sneak up on you, but even when it does, it’s hard to admit how you’ve gotten there. I try to have patience with myself when I experience that- always trying to learn when and where that limit is. I feel very grateful to have VV Lightbody on flutes for this song- a dear friend who has helped me through many of these conversations.”
Hannah Van Loon, who records shoegazey music under the moniker Tanukichan in collaboration with Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear, is back with a new single. Released via Company Records, ‘Make Believe’ marks the project’s first new music since their 2018 debut Sundays. Take a listen below.
Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, 
Arctic Monkeys are back with a new album, 
Carly Rae Jepsen has returned with her new album 
I Love to Lie
Frankie Cosmos have put out their latest album, 
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn have collaborated on the full-length project
Tegan and Sara have issued their 10th studio album and first for 
Pinkshift have dropped their debut album, 
Nick Hakim has released 
