Alvvays have released two new singles, ‘Belinda Says’ and ‘Very Online Guy’, which will appear on their upcoming album Blue Rev. They both come paired with videos co-directed by Colby Richardson and the band’s Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley. Check them out below.
The band had this to say about the new songs in a statement:
Two new lambs for the cultural volcano! One more sweet slurp of alcopop dedicated to the girls wiping tables called ‘Belinda Says’ and the dial-up electronic dream ‘Very Online Guy.’
We painted and shot the Belinda Says video in our living room. We directed a mosaic-mode vid for ‘V.O.G’. with our videoguru friend Colby. This was easily the funnest thing we’ve ever shot. Enjoy our clunky low-bit collage of aliased key clacking and step-dance scramble on your CRTs.
Indigo Sparke has shared a video for ‘Hysteria’, the title track and latest single from her forthcoming Aaron Dessner-produced album. It follows previous entries ‘Blue’ and ‘Pressure in My Chest’. Watch and listen below.
“This song is about being inside of love, right at the edge of hysteria,” Sparke explained ina statement. “There is often an axis point in things. A place where things can tip into chaos or become unhinged. A marker point. As beautiful and turbulent as these moments are, sometimes it’s hard to return from them to a place that makes sense and feels safe. I think for so long and maybe still, sometimes, I find it hard to keep my balance in love. So many fireworks. So many sorry’s. So much hope. So much deep yearning. So much joy. So much poignant reflection in the tidal pools of intimacy. This song was the birth place of the whole album. I had this song and the title before the rest found a home inside of this world too. I am still trying to unravel the bitter sweet nature of love and longing. What it means to truly let go. What it means to truly love.”
Nina Gofur, who directed the song’s visual, said: “Indigo’s voice has this unique vulnerability to it. It’s simultaneously tender and raw, yet possesses a lot of strength. Her lyrics wrap around you like a silver thread, stitching together different feelings you’ve been afraid to acknowledge. When I first heard the song I wanted to honor the feeling it elicited – an ode to reconciling the parts of yourself that seem to be in a tug of war. Indigo’s constant motion paints a blurred image of her either running away or returning to herself. Ultimately, she welcomes Hysteria as a guest; a temporary visitor. I wanted the visual to speak to the temporality of Hysteria and all the beautifully complex feelings it brings.”
Sophie Jamieson has released a new track, ‘Downpour’, alongside an accompanying video directed by herself and Ros Bullard. Check it out below.
The new song is lifted from Jamieson’s debut album Choosing, which is slated for release December 2 via Bella Union and was led by the single ‘Sink’. “This song came from a desperate need to fill a void I could not seem to fill myself,” the singer-songwriter explained in a statement. “I wanted to fix, and be fixed by somebody who was in no position to do so. I was blinded by this idea that they were the way out of my pain, and when they said no, the walls came tumbling in every time and I didn’t know how to hold them up.”
“The video was filmed at my local riverside in South East London,” Jamieson added. “I was fascinated by the movement of water and everything that changes its direction and its force. The way it both moves around, and pushes against everything it touches… even pushing against itself and eventually calming down. The way it has the ability to create space, and also to overwhelm, to drown.”
SZNZ: Autumn, the latest installment of Weezer’s seasonally themed EP series, has arrived on the official first day of fall. As they did around the release of their Spring and Summer EPs earlier this year, the band also performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night (September 21). Watch them play ‘What Happens After You’ and stream SZNZ: Autumn below.
Miss Grit, the moniker of New York-based, Korean-American artist Margaret Sohn, has announced their signing to Mute Records with a new single called ‘Like You’. Give it a listen below.
“I had the character of Ex Machina in mind as the voice I was singing from,” Sohn said of the song in a statement. “Her arc in the movie felt really beautiful to me, and I wanted to reach the same ending as her in this song.”
They added: “Mute is one of the labels I put on a pedestal in my mind. So the fact I was even on their radar was really flattering. And then to think they believed in my music enough to want to work together made me so happy.”
Peel Dream Magazine have shared a new single, ‘Hiding Out’. It’s taken from their upcoming album Pad, which includes the previously unveiled cuts ‘Pictionary’ and the title track. Check it out below, along with a video in which the band goes out surfing.
Speaking about the video, Peel Dream Magazine’s Joseph Stevens said in a statement:
“I’m originally from New York and I’d never surfed before, but I’ve met quite a few surfers here in LA and it has an obvious mystique. I asked my friend Leon if he had an extra board and if he would take me to one of his spots in Malibu, and we managed to rope our friend Bryce into filming it. I thought it would be funny to do the anti-surfing video, where all I do is fall over and over again, and I think we achieved that. You see the raw beauty of the landscape and the incredible vibes that were felt that day. There’s an obvious Beach Boys connection there too — when I think of my favorite album ‘Friends,’ this song and video channel that energy. Pure, but a little twisted. The song is about needing space, and funny enough, all of the lyrics are about me walking around Queens during quarantine. Calvary is a cemetery in Woodside that I would walk to regularly (“They guard the gates at Calvary, a secret place to be”), and I talk about wandering up to the Queensboro Bridge. On the one hand I’m downtrodden, but in the chorus, I enter my own secret world full of magic and color. It’s odd to be singing a song about New York from the cliffs of Malibu, but then again I am hiding aren’t I?
“‘in a breath’ is from my heart. It’s a song I’ve held on to for years,” said Pinkshift’s Ashrita Kumar, who wrote the track in 2018. “It’s a dive into my core, my greatest hopes, desires, loneliness, traumas, and fears. It’s a song about feeling dissociated from my body and fighting to stay alive despite it. It explores the existence of an impossible reality, contemplates the existence of a god, and contemplates our capacity to love and be loved. It’s about guilt, shame, redemption, and acceptance.”
Alice Glass has released her new song ‘Lips Apart’, which she’s been performing live since 2018. The track was co-produced by Matt Radd and Jupiter Io. Listen to it below.
Alice Glass issued her debut solo album, PREY//IV, back in February. She’s currently touring North America in support of the record.
New Pagans have returned with a new song, ‘Better People’, their first single of the year. The track was recorded in the Glens of Antrim in Ireland by the band and self-produced by the band. Check it out below.
Most people find it hard to reconcile mystery and meaning. You can spend hours obsessing over the thing that beguiles you, but often that doesn’t say much about your personal investment in it, the kind of thoughts and feelings it really stirs up – or how these might vary from one person to another. In Alex G’s music, as in most great art, those qualities are intertwined; you can’t get to the truth without obscuring or distorting it a little bit. But because of the perceived cryptic nature of his songwriting, as well as his own reluctance to decode it, Alex G’s discography has been subject to intense scrutiny and analysis that usually sidesteps the role of the subconscious, of absurdity, and even feeling. Since his debut on Domino, 2015’s Beach Music, the musician otherwise known as Alex Giannascoli has brought more structure and focus into his craft, refining it so that the immediacy of his melodic and aesthetic sensibilities shine through. His latest album God Save the Animals is the natural culmination of this, a mesmerizing record that’s replete with questions but never shrouds itself in them. As difficult as it is for its cast of characters to carve a single path, it’s never been easier for the listener to follow along.
God Save the Animals circles around a lot of the same themes that have percolated in Alex G’s music in the past – morality, innocence, hope – but rarely with such vivid clarity and wholeheartedness. Mirroring the sweet psychedelia of 2019’s House of Sugar but inching closer to pop, it stands as his most approachable set of songs to date without diluting his eccentric personality. Catchy melodies abound – especially in the album’s pre-release singles – but hand the stems of ‘Runner’ or ‘Miracles’ to any other writer and they might instead come up with bad copies of Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ or any Sufjan Stevens song, respectively. Alex G renders them distinct not just through his left-field production choices, but by stripping them of their nostalgic potential and weaving them into the sonic fabric of the album. You might be able to trace ‘Blessing’ back to a time when Christian rock and alternative metal thrived harmoniously in the mainstream, but I’d venture it’s because you’ve come across the New York Times profile where he talks about God and Audioslave; taken on its own, it’s a disorienting outlier that uses biblical language to evoke the murky line between impending catastrophe and transcendence.
The album is full of character and emotion, but as with Alex G’s previous releases, there’s more than just one of them, even within the span of a song. Sometimes the vocal layers are characteristically mutations of Giannascoli’s own, sometimes there are others creeping into the frame – the distinction is hardly significant, and is often downplayed. On opener ‘After All’, he duets with Jessica Lea Mayfield, their voices folding and fading into each other to otherworldly effect, introducing the record’s spiritual crux: “People come and people go away/ Yeah but God with me he stayed.” To the extent that Giannacoli has discussed the influence of religion, it’s through the lens of someone paying witness to, and becoming curious about, how it manifests in the people close to him. Switching perspective in the chorus, he gets to the core of how faith illuminates a person’s life: “In the years you feel the most alone/ You will build the walls I climb.”
God Save the Animals paints devotion as a possible antidote to horrifying dread, whatever its source might be – the stifling comforts of isolation, the loss of innocence, the dangers of escapism. On ‘Mission’, Giannascoli’s girlfriend, the violinist Molly Germer, jumps in with a meta comment, singing, “Hey, look in the mirror/ Ain’t gonna right your wrong with a stupid love song.” The songs on the record aren’t exactly inward-looking or contemplative, but their wondrous demeanor does reflect the openness that comes with a certain kind of soul-searching, which is reinforced by the more pristine quality of the recording. For the first time, Giannascoli recorded the album in several professional studios, and its playfulness has a different flavour than the kind that’s defined his prior output; it feels more purposeful. The characters are either lost, on the go, or caught in a spiral, but whenever fear or shame threatens to swallow them whole, as in ‘Cross the Sea’, the music pushes back, striking through the dissonance.
At this point in his career, Alex G seems equally enthralled by the power of vulnerability and subversion. “Naked in my innocence/ Tangled in my innocence,” he warbles on ‘S.D.O.S.’, his voice ghastly and unrecognizable, capturing a tension that runs throughout God Save the Animals. He revels in the directions the songs take him in, like when the simple affirmation of ‘No Bitterness’ – “My teacher is a child/ With a big smile/ No bitterness” – lends itself to hyperpop glee. ‘Ain’t It Easy’ finds a similar kind of joy in the mundane, in the routines and conversations that keep a relationship alive. God might not be an explicit part of the picture the way he was at the start of the album, but there’s less of a burden to love and forgiveness. There are questions, too, and still: “Haven’t I given enough? When will I run out of love?” Rather than chasing them down, though, Alex G invites us to ride a wave of infinite possibilities.
