Diana Ross has announced Thank You, her first new solo album in 15 years. Set for release on September 10 via Decca, it’s also her first new album of original material since 1999’s Every Day Is a New Day. Listen to the newly unveiled title track and find the tracklist below.
Written during lockdown and recorded in Ross’ home studio, Thank You will feature collaborations with Jack Antonoff, Jimmy Napes, Tayla Parx, Spike Stent, and more. “This collection of songs is my gift to you with appreciation and love,” Ross said in a statement. “I am eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to record this glorious music at this time. I dedicate this songbook of love to all of you, the listeners. As you hear my voice you hear my heart.”
Thank You Tracklist:
1. Thank You
2. If the World Just Danced
3. All Is Well
4. In Your Heart
5. Just In Case
6. The Answers Always Love
7. Let’s Do It
8. I Still Believe
9. Count On Me
10. Tomorrow
11. Beautiful Love
12. Time To Call
13. Come Together
Elusive UK collective SAULT have announced a new record titled NINE. The project, which will follow last year’s UNTITLED (Black Is) and UNTITLED (Rise), will be available on streaming services for a total of 99 days and will also be pressed to vinyl. The group’s website currently reads “107 Days Left of NINE,” seemingly indicating that it will be released next Friday, June 25. Check out the announcement below.
In 2019, SAULT issued the albums 5 and 7. UNTITLED (Black Is) and UNTITLED (Rise) arrived on Juneteenth amid Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd.
Fresh off the release of her new single ‘Solar Power’, Lorde has shared a new teaser video on her website. The silent clip, titled ‘Every Perfect Summer’s Gotta Take Its Flight’, features crop circles and sand writing that spell out ‘SP’. The title could be a reference to the ‘Liability’ lyric, “Every perfect summer’s eating me alive,” from 2017’s Melodrama. Watch it here.
‘Solar Power’, which features backing vocals from Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers, is the title track to the New Zealand pop star’s upcoming third album. “The album is a celebration of the natural world, an attempt at immortalising the deep, transcendent feelings I have when I’m outdoors,” she wrote in her newsletter. “In times of heartache, grief, deep love, or confusion, I look to the natural world for answers. I’ve learnt to breathe out, and tune in. This is what came through.”
“I want this album to be your summer companion, the one you pump on the drive to the beach,” she added. “The one that lingers on your skin like a tan as the months get cooler again.”
A teaser video Tyler shared titled ‘SIDE STREET’ ended with the phrase “Call Me If You Get Lost,” which also appeared in a series of billboards that went up in select cities in the US last week. On Tuesday, Tyler tweeted out a phone number that was also included in the billboards. Those teasers also appear at the end of the ‘LUMBERJACK’ visual.
Since the release of his 2019 album IGOR, Tyler, the Creator has shared the singles ‘BEST INTEREST’ and ‘GROUP B’, as well as the Coca-Cola jingle ‘Tell Me How’. He also teamed up with Channel Tres on ‘Fuego’ and Brent Faiyaz on ‘Gravity’.
Jessie Ware appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (June 15) to deliver a performance of her single ‘Remember Where You Are’ from an empty London Coliseum. Watch it below.
Ware’s most recent full-length album What’s Your Pleasure? arrived last year. Earlier this month, the singer released the deluxe version of the LP, which features five additional tracks, including Best New Songs‘Please’ and ‘Hot N Heavy’.
Chubby and the Gang have announced a new album titled The Mutt’s Nuts. The UK band’s first LP for Partisan Records was produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco and is due out August 27. Along with the announcement, the band has also shared a video for the new single ‘Coming Up Tough’. Check it out and find the album’s cover art and tracklist below.
“‘Coming Up Tough’ is about a family member of mine who ended up going to prison at very young age for over 20 years,” frontman Charlie Manning Walker (aka Chubby Charles’) explained in a statement. “He went in as a kid and spent most of his life in the system. Where’s the justice in that? You come out and have to prove yourself to a world that shut you away—what chance do you have? There’s no attempt at actual rehabilitation, no empathy, just a cage to be forgotten about. I wanted the song to feel like a snowball effect. The character gets thrown out of his house at first and it feels almost juvenile, but then as it progresses you realize the real trouble he’s in. And too often once you’re in trouble you can’t get out.”
1. The Mutt’s Nuts
2. It’s Me Who’ll Pay
3. Coming Up Tough
4. On the Meter
5. Beat That Drum
6. Pressure
7. Take Me Home to London
8. Life on the Bayou
9. White Rags
10. Overachiever
11. Someone’s Gunna Die
12. Getting Beat Again (Eppu Normaali)
13. Life’s Lemons
14. Lightning Don’t Strike Twice
15. I Hate the Radio
The Killers and Bruce Springsteen have teamed up for a new song called ‘Dustland’. It’s a new version of the band’s 2008 single ‘A Dustland Fairytale’, from the album Day & Age. Check it out below.
Frontman Brandon Flowers told Rolling Stone that the original plan was to play the song together live. “But the idea to record it remotely was initially about giving people something during quarantine,” he said. “‘Dustland’’s lineage leads straight to Bruce. When we finished it back in 2008, I sent him a copy and a note expressing my gratitude for his contribution to my life.”
He added: “I attribute my discovery and absorption of his music with helping me become a more authentic writer. He helped me to see the extraordinary in everyday people and their lives. And in this case, it was my parents who were under the microscope. Their faith and doubts, their search for salvation in the desert. It sounds Biblical. It also sounds Springsteenian.”
The Polaris Music Prize has announced its 2021 long list. The Weather Station, Yves Jarvis, CFCF, Helena Deland, Daniel Lanois, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Yu Su, Mustafa, the Besnard Lakes, Bernice, Cadence Weapon, Thanya Iyer, Klô Pelgag, TOBi, and more are up for the award, which is annually given to the best full-length Canadian album of the year, determined by an independent jury of nearly 200 music journalists, broadcasters and bloggers from across Canada. Check out the full list below.
Of the 40 Canadian artists announced on the Long List, only 10 will move on to the Short List, which will be revealed on July 15. Last year’s Polaris Prize was awarded to Backxwash.
2021 Polaris Music Prize Long List:
Art Bergmann – Late Stage Empire Dementia
Bernice – Eau De Bonjourno
The Besnard Lakes – The Besnard Lakes Are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice
Big Brave – Vital
Cadence Weapon – Parallel World
Charlotte Cardin – Phoenix
CFCF – memoryland
Clairmont The Second – It’s Not How It Sounds
Helena Deland – Someone New
DijahSB – Head Above the Waters
Kathleen Edwards – Total Freedom
Dominique Fils-Aimé – Three Little Words
Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition – Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition
Thanya Iyer – KIND
Yves Jarvis – Sundry Rock Song Stock
Rochelle Jordan – Play with the Changes
LAL – Meteors Could Come Down
Daniel Lanois – Heavy Sun
Thierry Larose – Cantalou
Russell Louder – Humor
Elliot Maginot – Easy Morning
Mustafa – When Smoke Rises
Laura Niquay – Waska Matisiwin
Nyssa – Girls Like Me
The OBGMs – The Ends
Dorothea Paas – Anything Can’t Happen
Klô Pelgag – Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs
Savannah Ré – Opia
Allison Russell – Outside Child
Julien Sagot – Sagot
Sargeant X Comrade – Magic Radio
Shabason, Krgovich & Harris – Philadelphia
Yu Su – Yellow River Blue
Julian Taylor – The Ridge
TEKE::TEKE – Shirushi
TOBi – Elements Vol. 1
Vagina Witchcraft – Vagina Witchcraft
The Weather Station – Ignorance
Zoon – Bleached Wavves
Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew has announced a new instrumental album called Influences, sharing the new single ‘The Slinfold Loop’, too. The album will be released under the moniker K.D.A.P. (Kevin Drew a Picture) on July 16 via Arts and Crafts. Check out the new song below and scroll down for the LP’s cover artwork and tracklist.
“We live in a society that’s based on selling yourself back to yourself,” Drew said of ‘The Slinfold Loop’ in a statement. “It’s created an underground battle to constantly be searching for “true identity.” We wanted to create a video presentation that promotes exploring over searching and brings the mystical slide-show of never ending opinion to the forefront of this battle. We used available footage from the World Wide Web from other artists and cut together a blender of images to tell a love story about continuing to move forward amongst the never ending information of how one is supposed to live.”
Influences, the follow-up to 2014’s Darlings, was created during the pandemic using the smartphone beat-making app Endlesss. Drew wrote the album during walks through the woods of Slinford and London’s Islington district.
Influences Cover Artwork:
Influences Tracklist:
1. The Slinfold Loop
2. Hopefully Something
3. Dooms Dive
4. Shadow Rescues
5. You and Me and Them
6. Wilner’s Parade
7. Explosive Lip Balm
8. Almost Victory (Keep End Going)
Sleater-Kinney have always been pretty direct with their album titles, but The Center Won’t Hold was more telling than most. The phrase encapsulated the uneasy tension at the heart of the title track to the band’s St. Vincent-produced 2019 effort, an industrial, experimental cut that stood out as the opener for the record. But it was also indicative of the general direction of the album, a messy attempt at matching the band’s immediacy with left-field pop production that too often ended up feeling discordant and unsure of itself. There was no center holding it all together, but in more awkward than interesting ways. Two years later comes Path of Wellness, whose own announcement and accompanying single felt thematically charged more than anything, hinting at a back-to-basics, straightforward rock approach that would chart the band’s search for hope and comfort. It would offer what Sleater-Kinney seemed to have lost on The Center Won’t Hold, something no fan ever truly expected from them: reliability.
Lyrically, the band – now the duo of Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker after the departure of drummer Janet Weiss in 2019 – are smart enough to undercut this narrative on one of the album’s most satirical, self-referencing tracks. “You come here for security/ You come here for consistency/ And we’re here to serve you dinner/ Without using any knives,” they sing on ‘No Knives’, and the message cuts deep. But as a whole, Path of Wellness simply lacks the sharp, incisive songwriting that Sleater-Kinney built their name on, and when they do deliver it, there’s less of a bite to the instrumentation for it to really shine through. Compared to The Center Won’t Hold, which felt cluttered but was at least bold enough to try and push their sound forward, the new album seems to revert back to the simple pleasures of their excellent 2015 reunion album No Cities to Love while anchoring in the solid structures of 1999’s The Hot Rock. But there’s just not enough moments of pure impact and dynamism for it to stand on the same level.
Part of it comes down to how things sound. In addition to it being their first album without Weiss since 1996, Path of Wellness is also Sleater-Kinney’s first self-produced album, with Brownstein and Tucker enlisting local Portland musicians to complete their vision. Instead of finding a replacement for Weiss, they got three different drummers to play on the album, including touring member Angie Boylan. Weiss’ absence can certainly be felt, but none of the musicians do a bad job here, and it’s useless pointing out what she might have brought to the table. The larger problem is that there’s less of a vision to bring to life, and at times the pair seems to be aimlessly trying to tap into what they’ve always done well without paying much attention to what’s in front of them. ‘Tomorrow’s Grave’ is one of the album’s most interesting tracks, but the guitar solo towards the end sounds flavorless at best and amateurish at worst, just ambling through.
It’s clear Sleater-Kinney haven’t lost the spark that makes them one of the greatest bands of the past few decades. If this were your introduction to Sleater-Kinney, Corin Tucker’s powerful voice and Brownstein’s distinctive style would still leave you in awe. If you’re a longtime fan and your streaming platform of choice starts playing ‘Dig Me Out’ after the final track, you’ll notice those basic foundations are still there, even if much of the urgency is missing. Then again, that’s partly the point: Path of Wellness is looser and more playful, and, when it fully leans into those qualities, better for it. But despite being generally pleasant and more cohesive than its predecessor, there’s still an awkwardness that ruins some otherwise fine songs. ‘Down the Line’, a meditation on the COVID-19 crisis, includes the lines, “It’s not the summer we were promised/ It’s the summer that we deserve.”
The closest the album comes to capturing the brilliance of the band’s earlier work is ‘Favorite Neighbor’, which features one of its most memorable hooks and fiery performances from everyone involved. But Path of Wellness offers very little to latch onto, stumbling most when it resorts to a brand of optimism that feels airless and stripped of personality. That’s more or less the note the albums ends on, hopeful yet strangely empty, urging us to ‘Bring Mercy’ back into our lives: “Pack your bags with things to lift you up/ Got nothing without hope/ Keep vision alive with the heroes you know.” It’s a lovely tune, and they sing it with conviction, but the details around and leading up to it are so vague that it just doesn’t hit the way it’s supposed to. Instead of showcasing the band’s knack for triumphant, introspective songwriting, the album leaves you wondering where, exactly, this middling path leads.
