Years & Years has today released a new single, ‘Sooner or Later’, the final offering from his upcoming album Night Call. The track was co-written by Olly Alexander, Clarence Coffee Jr., and Mark Ralph, who also produced the LP. Give it a listen below.
Night Call, the follow-up to 2018’s Palo Santo, is set to arrive on January 21 via Interscope. So far, Alexander has previewed the record with the songs ‘Sweet Talker’, ‘Starstruck’, and ‘Crave’.
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on January 14, 2022:
Earl Sweatshirt is back with a new album titled SICK!. Out now via Tan Cressida/Warner Records, the follow-up to 2019’s FEET OF CLAY was preceded by the singles ‘Tabula Rasa’, ‘Titanic’, and ‘2010’ and includes guest appearances from Armand Hammer and Bruiser Brigade’s Zelooperz. “SICK! is my humble offering of 10 songs recorded in the wake of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns,” the rapper said in a statement. “Before the virus I had been working on an album I named after a book I used to read with my mother (‘The People Could Fly’). Once the lockdowns hit, people couldn’t fly anymore. A wise man said art imitates life. People were sick. The People were angry and isolated and restless. I leaned into the chaos cause it was apparent that it wasn’t going anywhere. these songs are what happened when I would come up for air.”
FKA twigs has dropped her new mixtape, CAPRISONGS, via Young/Atlantic. Arriving three years after MAGDALENE, the 17-track effort features the artist’s recent Weeknd collaboration ‘Tears in the Club’ as well as contributions from Shygirl, Rema, Pa Salieu, Koreless, Tobias Jesso Jr., Fred again.., Jorja Smith, Mike Dean, Warren Ellis, and more. “if you are lonely or feel isolated or void of encouragement by your immediate circle you can borrow my friends on the mixtape,” twigs wrote on Twitter. “i think it’s my response to where the world has been at in recent times the humm of the background podcast acting as the soundtrack to our lives as we desperately try not to be alone pablo had so much belief in me it gave me a lot of confidence to want more for myself as an artist. also to reach out and collaborate with other artists and also to push myself to channel my pain and anxiety into work that felt more inclusive and dare i say joyful this is something i have never been able to do before in my art.”
Cat Power has released a new covers album, simply titled Covers, which is out now via Domino. Produced entirely by Chan Marshall, the LP includes her versions of songs by Frank Ocean, Billie Holiday, Bob Seger, Lana Del Rey, Jackson Browne, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, The Replacements, The Pogues, and more. It also features a new take on her own song ‘Hate’, from 2006’s The Greatest, retitled ‘Unhate’. Completing a trilogy of sorts, Covers follows Cat Power’s previous mostly-covers collections Jukebox (2008) and The Covers Record (2000).
Storm Queen is the sophomore album by Melbourne singer-songwriter Grace Cummings. Out now via ATO Records, the follow-up to 2019’s Refuge Cove was produced by Cummings herself and includes the previously released singles ‘Heaven’, ‘Up In Flames’, and the title track. “In the past there were times when I’ve let other people’s opinions affect me too much,” she explained in a statement. “But with this record I learned that I’m allowed to influence myself instead of taking in anyone else’s ideas. I learned to completely trust what I see and hear in my head, and I stuck with that and just focused on creating what I love the most: something real and raw and ugly and beautiful.”
Elvis Costello has issued a new album with his band the Imposters. The Boy Named If, out today via EMI/Capitol, includes the advance tracks ‘Farewell, OK’, ‘Paint the Red Rose Blue’, and ‘Magnificent Hurt’. ”The full title of this record is ‘The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories)’,” Costello said in press materials. “‘IF,’ is a nickname for your imaginary friend; your secret self, the one who knows everything you deny, the one you blame for the shattered crockery and the hearts you break, even your own.” Co-produced with Sebastian Krys, the album is a collection of songs that “take us from the last days of a bewildered boyhood to that mortifying moment when you are told to stop acting like a child – which for most men (and perhaps a few gals too) can be any time in the next fifty years,” Costello added.
The Wombats have returned with a new album called Fix Yourself, Not the World. Out today via AWAL, the LP was recorded remotely during various COVID-19 lockdowns and was produced by Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers), Gabe Simon (Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey), Paul Meaney (Twenty One Pilots, Nothing But Thieves), Mark Crew (Bastille, Rag‘n’Bone Man) and Mike Crossey (The 1975, The War on Drugs, Yungblud). The band members were never in the same room during the process of making the album; Matthew “Murph” Murphy is based in Los Angeles, bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen in Oslo, and drummer Dan Haggis in London.
Cordae, From a Bird’s Eye View; Bonobo, Fragments; Fuss, We’re Not Alone; Sea Girls, Homesick; Fickle Friends, Are We Gonna Be Alright?; The Lumineers, Brightside; Anna Von Hausswolff, Live at Montreal Jazz Festival; Underoath, Voyeurist; Blood Red Shoes, Ghosts on Tape.
Phil Elverum has shared the details of an expansive, career-spanning Microphones box set. The 10xLP set, titled The Microphones – completely everything, 1996 – 2021, will include all seven official Microphones albums, download codes for 74GB worth of digital material (including the complete discography, early cassettes, unreleased outtakes, live recordings, and stems), plus a 107-page book featuring never-before-seen photos, notebook pages, artworks, and detailed notes. There’s also a “special fancy little decorative sash garlanding the top of the box, silver foil stamped and delicate.” Watch a trailer for the release below.
On his website, Elverum suggests that completely everything will mark the end of the Microphones project. “Here you can buy everything from the Microphones contained in a humongous box,” he wrote. “This is final. To commemorate and tombstone 25 years of this intermittently-awake recording project, we made this chunk. It’s a 10 pounder, lift with your legs.” The box set, which ships out in February, will be a limited-edition, one-time run, and will not be re-pressed. You can pre-order it here.
The Microphones’ last album was Microphones in 2020.
PJ Harvey has announced a reissue of her ninth studio album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project. It’s due for release on March 11, and a demo version of ‘The Wheel’ is out today. Check it out below.
Last year, PJ Harvey reissued several of her albums on vinyl, including 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, 2004’s Uh Huh Her, and 2007’s White Chalk. Next up is a reissue of 2011’s Let England Shake, which comes out January 28. In April, PJ Harvey will publish a book-length narrative poem called Orlam written in the Dorset dialect.
Saba has recruited Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Krayzie Bone for a new song called ‘Come My Way’. It’s taken from Saba’s upcoming album, Few Good Things, which is set to arrive on February 4 and includes the previously released singles ‘Fearmonger’ and ‘Stop That’. Listen to ‘Come My Way’ below.
“When I think back on first discovering Bone Thugs-N-Harmony as a child, it immediately stood out to me as unique,” Saba said of the collaboration in a statement. “I started paying attention and really learning how to rap from listening to them and trying to recite it. It felt honest and completely true to themselves — authentic in a way that doesn’t come around very often and in a way that will be impossible to recreate. Their mix of melody and rhythms that I had never heard is what connected with me in a way that other music just didn’t. It inspired me to be more creative.“
Talking about the inspiration behind the track, Saba added:
It’s an ode to nostalgia, and growing up, and I think ‘hopeful’ and ‘soulful’ are accurate descriptions of the song. I considered a poverty song as a concept for this one. ‘All I’m doing [is] thinking how to get some money, and then we’ll be good.’ This is a false statement, but one that I believed at a point, and many others believe right now. This song also takes place in that nostalgic kind of setting. I’m describing many things that are normal on the westside of Chicago, so that it plays like just any other day — pretty stagnant but having so much life. ‘We ain’t got no time to relax’ is a harsh reality for so many people experiencing this type of poverty where the focus is on work and survival. ‘Had to run them niggas shooting shit, I wish that the guys had shields’ is an acknowledgement of grief, but the song is not written as to feel sad or sorry for ourselves. It is a reality, not one I or anyone else can change, so this song is about getting up the next day and getting to work, or getting to it however you provide, but just moving on in that fashion. ‘And then we’ll be good,’ throughout whatever adversity, and challenges, and otherwise just fucked up shit comes our way.
Jack White has released ‘Love Is Selfish’, the first single to be taken from his second album of 2022, Entering Heaven Alive. Listen to it below.
Jack White is putting out two LPs this year: Fear of the Dawn, which arrives on April 8, and Entering Heaven Alive, which is out July 22. Back in October, he shared Fear of the Dawn‘s opening track, ‘Taking Me Back’. To support the albums, White will embark on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which includes dates in the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe.
Eddie Vedder has shared a new single, ‘Brother the Cloud’, which is set to appear on his upcoming solo album Earthling. The track follows previous entries ‘Long Way’ and ‘The Haves’. Give it a listen below.
Earthling, Vedder’s first solo LP since 2011’s Ukulele Songs, is due out February 11 via Seattle Surf/Republic. The album features guest appearances from Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Andrew Watt, Chad Smith, and Josh Klinghoffer.
Jenny Gillespie Mason was pregnant with her second child when the idea of Sis started coming together in 2015. The Bay Area-based singer and composer, who is also the founder of Native Cat Recordings, had already been putting out records under her own name for several years, and the new project was born partly out of a desire to incorporate more electronic textures into her folk-oriented songwriting. After weaving her wide range of influences in intricate ways on the first two Sis records, 2018’s Euphorbia and 2019’s Gas Station Roses, she returned with a new EP called Gnani earlier this month. Unlike previous, more collaborative releases, the six-song effort was mostly recorded at Mason’s home studio in Berkeley, CA, though it features tasteful contributions from the likes of Brijean Murphy on percussion and Doug Stuart on bass. Sis’ sound has become more intimate and playful but remains just as enchanting and immersive, each track representing its own ethereal journey brimming with strange, mystical detail. “Came on this trip to find life/ And the way to find life/ Is to know it stops midair,” she sings on ‘Wooie’, yet the song keeps going for just as long before, naturally, it dissolves.
We caught up with Sis’ Jenny Gillespie Mason for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about healing, the making of her new EP, and more.
Listening to your new EP at this time of year, the songs feel especially hopeful and gentle. To what extent was that intentional – the tone and the timing of the release?
I was definitely happy that it was timed to the new year, but that was more just for press reasons. The intention was to heal the listener and to heal myself while I was making it and to connect to God in a devotional way. I think that that comes through, and I’m so pleased that people are responding in the way they are and that it’s helping them transport to a place in themselves that’s connected with the divine.
Was there a particular reason that you went with the shorter format rather than a full-length?
Honestly, I got to the six songs and I was just spent. Not in a bad way, I just felt like I put so much into the six songs and I was so happy with where they were, I didn’t have the energy really to make more stuff at that point. And I felt ready to kind of get back into my life as a mother. I was still mothering, but I was definitely pushing it, like staying up really late to make the record. [laughs] I think it was a combination of just running out of inspiration and also feeling like this is a complete thing and I can offer this now.
It does feel complete to me as it is. I was reading your essay, The Beach and the Bells, which was published back in May 2020 and is just a beautiful meditation on motherhood and family life during the pandemic. Does it feel strange to think that it was almost two years ago that you wrote that?
Thank you so much, that’s so kind. Yes, very strange. When I wrote it, I thought, this is not gonna last that long, but I want to capture what it feels like right now and what we’ve all been through. We’ve had so many ups and downs, and the nuance of each turn is worthy of several essays. I’m trying to write a creative nonfiction book about the last two years now, that’s my newest hope. We’ll see how that goes.
That’s something that stood out to me about the essay – how you pay attention to those nuances, the small details in your observations. Is that something you’ve been trying to actively cultivate in your music and writing more generally?
The intimacy of detail is something I’m always striving for, especially in prose. I think with songwriting, I tend to let myself become a bit more aphoristic, I guess, or lyrical, striving a bit more towards the poetry side of things. But I’m really big on those little details – observing human works and looking out into nature, seeing what you can find, how it’s mirroring us back.
Has that always been a sort of instinct of yours, or is it something you’ve learned over the years?
It’s definitely always been that way. I feel like I’ve always felt kind of like an alien. [laughs] Just observing the world around me and trying to understand, trying to order the chaos of experience through art and through writing. And also, just finding those connections between humans – that’s a big part of my work, I think, is really discovering that love and that connection in the human experience.
To get back to healing, that’s also a theme that runs through this new EP specifically. How has your definition of healing changed over time and during the making of these songs?
On a personal level, I felt very blocked. I’d had this band that was this big experience with touring and collaborating in the studio, and everybody moved to LA right before the pandemic. I’m in Northern California, they moved to LA, so that was sort of like a mourning process. And then the pandemic hit, and that was really intense and traumatic for everybody. I was also just trying to uncover some shadow stuff in myself that probably needed to come up to heal from my childhood and teens and 20s. So all of these things came together that were difficult for me, and I felt so blocked.
And then, to be honest, I did this thing called Kambo, which is like a frog medicine from the Amazon. After that, things started to gush out of me, and it started with journaling, just free writing. I feel like this was the first creative project that the healing was taking place in real time, and I was intentionally like, “This is going to heal me.” And it really did. On the other side of it, I felt like a new person. Before, I’d done albums and it was like, “I’m an artist, I want to express myself and I have these things inside that are coming up,” but it wasn’t like, “I’m going to use this to heal myself, get myself through this shadowy period.”
So does this feel like a new start for you and the Sis project?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think it’s finally me just being totally me in my music. It’s like a combination for me of all the work I’ve done for so long with so many different people, and now I feel like I have the tools to keep going on my own.
For a lot of artists, there’s sort of necessarily been this trajectory of their process becoming more solitary or less collaborative during the pandemic, but it seems like for you it was already leaning that way.
Yeah, I think I had already started before feeling like I just want to do my own thing for a while. I got really into Four Tet because he does everything by himself, and he was kind of my model. I still would love to collaborate with people – it’s just the core of the project, I think I can keep going with my own thing.
What has Sis come to mean for you as a creative outlet?
It’s just like my play space. It’s where I can go into the wild and play and worship God and understand myself. It’s like my wild garden, I guess, and I feel like I finally found the key to my secret wild garden and I can keep going back.
I was intrigued by this this concept of “woo” that you’ve talked about in relation to the song ‘Wooie’, which is more centered on place and a sense of magic and escape. Did making that song and the EP as whole bring you closer to that imagined city that you refer to there?
Yes, definitely. Another impetus to this project was building a world the sound and the landscape and the and the ambience, and I think each song is like its own little city in a way, its own locale. And I think I found the escape I needed – I was listening to a Kate Bush interview while making it, and she said that the studio was her escape. It was almost reassuring for me to hear her say that, like, it can be my escape too. I want this to be something real and pure – it can just be so much fun to escape into it and to play. We all need that right now, to play more.
I read that wanting to incorporate more synths was part of the reason that you wanted to start Sis, and you also use a wide array of vintage keyboards specifically on this EP. Can you talk about what appeals to you about using these instruments?
When I first started the band, I had been doing a folky thing for a long time. So that was just a way to to say this is a new thing for me, but I also was drawn to the sounds and I liked the emotional depth of the synths. Like the OP-1 synth, I was playing a lot in the early days. And then I knew that this project, it was going to be an electronic project. I discovered this synth called Omnisphere, which is based on the computer and has like 5 million sounds on it, so I knew I was going to be using that a lot. But I grew up playing piano and acoustic guitar, that’s just a part of my makeup as an artist, and I think I need something tangible and earthy and I need my hands playing something real in order for what I’m creating to feel whole. So I’d just never really explored the vintage synths and keyboard world, and I found this great guy here who sells them and just I filled up my home with all these great instruments. I kind of had my electronic studio in one room and then I had the earthy, organic studio in another room and was going back and forth.
I wanted to ask you about the vocal recording on ‘Flower in Space’. What’s the origin of that?
That was my therapist at the time, talking to me about an Ayahuasca journey. She herself was very well versed in psychedelics, and so she was talking to me about the Vendanta ways, the Indian spiritual approach to having no head, which is like a non-dual approach to seeing the world. And I’d had this experience during my ceremony of seeing myself without a head in the mirror. So she was talking to me about that, and the song, I’m trying to sort of get at non-duality and to get at, like: we’re all here in these bodies and incarnated but we’re so much more, we come from our higher selves and our soul and we’re just on this flower in space, I was seeing Earth as a little flower. I had these empty spaces in the song and I just needed something, I needed something real and earthy and her voice is so beautiful. She doesn’t know I used it yet. [laughs] Maybe she’ll find out. I think she’d be okay with it.
When thinking about this idea of a higher self beyond our physical form, how have you found a way of reaching a deeper connection with others in your day-to-day life, despite there being this disconnect?
I feel really lucky that I’ve made some really wonderful female friends in the last few years. I have some incredible longtime friends. It’s not many people, but I have some really good friends. I hope everybody can take heart in their friendships right now. And just being a mother, you’re so connected with your children as it is that even if I didn’t have those friends, I would be feeling blessed with my connection to them.
When you think about your different roles as an artist, a musician, a mother, a friend – where do you feel like those paths sort of meet? Do you try to set boundaries in the way you approach them?
I had a therapist in my 20s, and I remember she said that you want to just make sure you’re consistent in all of your roles – consistent in terms of being authentic, doing the best you can and being humble, being willing to learn, being truthful. That, I think, is always with me, but it’s still very difficult to be consistent across roles. And I think becoming a mother is really intense and the first few years, you do lose yourself. Not every woman, but I definitely did. And it took me a while to return to Jenny, not just Mom. It was really difficult for me to integrate my music life into the home life and have it be balanced. It was very imbalanced for a while, especially when I was touring and trying to be like 25 when I wasn’t 25 anymore and I had two kids. [laughs] So this project, because I was doing so much of it at home, it started to feel really integrated. I was able to really balance motherhood with the music in a way that felt much healthier.
Can you give me an example of what it looks like to be authentic to yourself now that the project is done?
When I started Gnani, I had unblocked myself and I felt ready to go, but I was pushing myself really hard. And so the first few drafts, they weren’t working really. I had a friend who’s also a healer, who told me, “Part of the artistic process is rest.” And so I did, I let myself rest for like a good month before I really started the project. I didn’t do anything, I just read. I was reading Middlemarch. I was just trying to just take care of myself and take walks and be a good friend, hang out with my husband and my friends. And then eventually I felt rested enough to go for it. I think that’s kind of where I am at right now. I’m in the resting period and I’m doing little things creatively, but I’m not pushing myself too hard.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Sis’ Gnani EP is out now via Native Cat Recordings.
Alynda Segarra has previewed her upcoming Hurray for the Riff Raff album with a new single, ‘Pierced Arrows’. Following previous offerings ‘Rhododendron’ and ‘Jupiter’s Dance’, the track arrives alongside a video directed by New Orleans artist Lucia Honey. Check it out below.
According to Segarra, ‘Pierced Arrows’ is “a heartbreak song, lost in the realm of memory. Being stuck in the past, and finding the rapidly changing world uncanny and bizarre. Trying to outrun trauma. Finding a meeting place between tough and tender. Memory replaying inside/beside you, triggering fight or flight responses.”
Of the video, Honey added: “We took inspiration from arthouse cinema from the turn of the millennium. Run Lola Run, Requiem For a Dream, My Own Private Idaho. We wanted ‘Pierced Arrows’ to have a gritty narrative feel but that still indulged in a surrealist aesthetic. The song lends itself to a narrative climax. The first time I heard it, I felt like I was in the middle of a brewing storm. I couldn’t escape the reference to Hurricane Ida, which hit Southern Louisiana hard in late August. This blended well with themes from Alynda’s song which is largely about running from a past that always catches up to you. Hence physical running in industrial landscapes. Metal. Trainyards. Escapism. Cold anxiety. Being stuck in a trauma loop.”
Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new LP, titled Life on Earth, is out February 18 via Nonesuch.
Tears for Fears have released a new song called ‘Break the Man’, taken from their upcoming album The Tipping Point. The single, which follows the title track and ‘No Small Thing’, was co-written and co-produced by Charlton Pettus. Check it out below.
“‘Break The Man’ is about a strong woman, and breaking the patriarchy,” Curt Smith said in a statement. “I feel that a lot of the problems we’ve been having as a country and even worldwide to a certain degree has come from male dominance. It’s a song about a woman who is strong enough to break the man. For me, that would be an answer to a lot of the problems in the world — a better male-female balance.”
The Tipping Point, the group’s first album in 17 years, arrives February 25 via Concord Records.
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