“’Munitions’ was one of the first tracks I wrote for this album and sits at the beginning of the tracklisting,” Matthew Barnes explained in a press release. “It was written during a few bleak late winter nights in my studio I set up in a cold warehouse in Liverpool and set the tone for much of the album writing that followed it. The video directed with visual artist Sam Weihl captures some of the feel of those writing sessions: dimly lit, industrial, dreamlike.”
Bolted, the follow-up to 2017’s Compassion, arrives on October 20 via Ninja Tune.
After an energetic and hyper Day 1, particularly after the frenetic and lively sets by closers Carly Rae Jepsen and Maggie Rogers, my feet were a little tired coming into Day 2 of All Things Go 2023 at Merriweather Post Pavilion. Luckily, this day was filled with performers best known for songwriting and experimental instrumentals, lending the crowd to sway rather than jump up and down and expend energy. Singer-songwriters and talented vocalists performed on another sunny day in Columbia, Maryland, closing out a massively successful festival weekend.
Samia
Samia took the Chrysalis stage early in the day to sing her tracks about devastation, lust, yearning, and romance, enforcing her credibility as one of the most wrenching songwriters performing today. Opening with her anxious track ‘Pool’, she sang (relatably) about the terrors of everyday life: “How long do I have left with my dog ‘til I start forgetting shit?”, then transitioned into the satirical ‘Fit N Full’. I had seen Samia once before, and her energy and joy on stage remained the same while performing upbeat hits from her debut album The Baby. Some more tracks from her excellent Honey, released earlier this year, would have been great too, but the crowd singing along to the emotional lyrics from ‘Kill Her Freak Out’ (“I hope you marry the girl from your hometown, and I’ll fucking kill her, and I’ll fucking freakout”) and feel-good drunk anthem ‘Honey’ was more than enough to satisfy the Samia fans in the crowd.
Ethel Cain
I have a bone to pick with whomever did the scheduling for early Sunday afternoon, as Ethel Cain’s set started abruptly in the middle of Samia’s, the opening notes of ‘A House In Nebraska’ ringing out across the festival grounds like an ominous siren call. People legitimately ran to the main stage in order to hear her stomping hit ‘American Teenager’ and remained to hear more of the Floridian’s songs from her breakout album Preacher’s Daughter. Between the two, I had seen both before, and Samia is a more dynamic performer (only because of the genre of music she performs), so I stayed to hear her set play out. I caught the last half of Ethel Cain’s, which began with the powerful slowburn ‘Thoroughfare’, transitioned to the warm, gospel-like ‘Sun Bleached Flies’, and ended with the powerful and upbeat ‘Crush’.
Alex G
Credit: ALIVE
I had never listened to anything by Alex G before his setlist, so I was surprised, mesmerized, and allured by the indie rocker’s bizarre runtime. Playing 17 tracks, most of which from his 2022 record God Save the Animals, the musician used soundboards and a guitar to broadcast his experimental ideas. This was definitely filed under “Not sure what’s going on, but I like it!”
MUNA
Credit: ALIVE
Electrifying and liberating queer trio MUNA closed out the Chrysalis stage Sunday night, and as lead singer Katie Gavin put it, she thought of it as opening for Lana Del Rey, clearly an exciting notion. After adorning the festival as “Lesbo-palooza,” they performed a great mix of well-written and clever electropop, during which I was lucky enough to be right near the barricade. Other band members Jo Maskin and Naomi McPherson had the time of their lives performing songs from their three albums, mostly from their excellent self-titled 2022 record. Highlights included the pleasure-seeking ‘What I Want’, triumphant and caring “I Know A Place’, and new single ‘One That Got Away’. Before their feel-good country anthem ‘Kind of Girl’, they dedicated the number to all the trans people in the audience, a nod to the anti-queer legislation taking place in the country at the moment. Just performing as three queer people with an audience of mostly queer fans is a statement in and of itself. They closed the show with fan-favorite ‘Silk Chiffon’, bringing Arlo Parks onto the stage, who performed earlier in the evening, and it was hard to leave the set feeling incredible and like you belonged.
Lana Del Rey
Credit: ALIVE
With everyone gathering at the main stage at 9:30, the hills adorned with blankets and standing fans, it was hard to feel like something extraordinarily momentous wasn’t about to happen. A few minutes after her scheduled time, Lana Del Rey graced the stage in a gorgeous black gown, singing the title track from her best album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!. She performed a shortened version of it, along with ‘Arcadia’, ‘A&W’, and ‘The Grants’, owing to time, though her omission of the latter’s heavenly outro was a little disappointing. However, it can’t be said enough how incredible Lana sounded live, as she sang slower cuts like ‘Bartender’ and ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’ in the middle of graceful dancers. Though she kept thanking Baltimore for our presence (we were in Columbia), referencing the full moon we were under (it wasn’t), her actual set was mesmerizing, including well-known songs cut from each of her albums, save Honeymoon. At the halfway point, she brought out frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff to sing the lovely ode to his wife ‘Margaret’, then a shortened version of ‘Venice Bitch’, one of Lana’s best songs.
Afterwards, nervous that Merriweather would cut her off because she started early (they allegedly have a very strict curfew policy), she switched up the tracklist so that she’d be able to perform what she’d been saving for last. “Wanna sing ‘Video Games’ with me?” she asked the crowd, to an emphatic yes, and swinging on a flower-laden swing, she performed her song that started it all. ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ came next, with an angelic outro that made the song a gratifying one to hear live. After a quick audience poll as to what they wanted to hear next, Lana performed the intense ‘Ultraviolence’ and ‘Born to Die’, before closing with the graceful ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it’ the outro during which she was dragged off-stage in a white hospital gown, feigning psychiatric evaluation (making sense with the Sylvia Plath and “sociopath” lyricism in the song). Odd art performance piece or not, Lana closed out the weekend the only way she knew how, and earlier in the night, she thanked the crowd for allowing her and her band to do so. “I hope you do too,” she urged the crowd, during her moving and legendary set, “as crazy as you wanna be.”
Mackenzie Scott is back with news of her next Torres album: what an enormous room lands on January 26 via Merge Records. The follow-up to 2021’s Thirstier is led by the new single ‘Collect’. “This song is about justice being served,” Scott explained in a statement. “The rage song I’ve been trying to write for years!” Check out director Dani Okon‘s video for it below, and scroll down for the album cover, tracklist, and Torres’ upcoming tour dates.
Scott produced what an enormous room with Sarah Jaffe. It was recorded at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina, and mastered by Heba Kadry. Julien Baker, in the LP’s official bio, writes: “What I can say about TORRES is I think the music comes from a convicted place. […] And I think it’s just incredibly good music to listen to.”
what an enormous room Cover Artwork:
what an enormous room Tracklist:
1. Happy Man’s Shoes
2. Life as We Don’t Know It
3. I Got the Fear
4. Wake to Flowers
5. Ugly Mystery
6. Collect
7. Artificial Limits
8. Jerk Into Joy
9. Forever Home
10. Songbird Forever
Torres 2024 Tour Dates:
Wed, Jan 17 – Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop *
Thu, Jan 18 – Chicago, IL – Venue TBA
Fri, Jan 19 – Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar *
Sat, Jan 20 – Nashville, TN – The Basement *
Mon, Jan 22 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade (Purgatory) *
Tue, Jan 23 – Durham, NC – Motorco *
Wed, Jan 24 – Washington, DC – The Atlantis *
Thu, Jan 25 – Philadelphia, PA – The Foundry *
Fri, Jan 26 – Brooklyn, NY – Elsewhere *
Sat, Jan 27 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair
Fri, Feb 2 – Paris, FR – Le Hasard Ludique
Sat, Feb 3 – Bruges, BE – Cactus Club
Mon, Feb 5 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso Upstairs
Tue, Feb 6 – Cologne, DE – Bumann & SOHN
Wed, Feb 7 – Berlin, DE – Privatclub
Thu, Feb 8 – Munich, DE – Milla
Sat, Feb 10 – Baden, CH – One of a Million Festival
Mon, Feb 12 – Manchester, UK – YES
Tue, Feb 13 – Bristol, UK – Strange Brew
Wed, Feb 14 – London, UK – Oslo
Wed, Mar 20 – Denver, CO – Larimer Lounge ^
Fri, Mar 22 – Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court ^
Sat, Mar 23 – Boise, ID – Venue TBA
Tue, Mar 26 – Seattle, WA – Neumos ^
Wed, Mar 27 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios ^
Fri, Mar 29 – San Francisco, CA – Cafe Du Nord ^
Sat, Mar 30 – Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room ^
Mon, Apr 1 – San Diego, CA – Casbah ^
Tue, Apr 2 – Phoenix, AZ – Valley Bar ^
Thu, Apr 4 – Dallas, TX – Club Dada ^
Fri, Apr 5 – Austin, TX – The Parish ^
Sat, Apr 6 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs) ^
Sleater-Kinney have announced their next album: Little Rope will be out on January 19, 2024 via Loma Vista. John Congleton produced the follow-up to 2021’s Path of Wellness, which was recorded at Flora Recording and Playback in Portland, Oregon. Lead single ‘Hell’ arrives today with a music video directed by Ashley Connor and starring Miranda July. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below, along with the band’s upcoming tour dates.
Little Rope was partially inspired by the death of Carrie Brownstein’s mother and stepfather in a car accident while vacationing in Italy. “As Brownstein and Tucker moved through the early aftermath of the tragedy, elements of what was to become the emotional backbone of Little Rope began to form – how we navigate grief, who we navigate it with, and the ways it transforms us,” a press release explains.
“I don’t think I’ve played guitar that much since my teens or early twenties,” Brownstein said in a statement. “Literally moving my fingers across the fretboard for hours on end to remind myself I was still capable of basic motor skills, of movement, of existing.”
Little Rope Cover Artwork:
Little Rope Tracklist:
1. Hell
2. Needlessly Wild
3. Say It Like You Mean It
4. Hunt You Down
5. Small Finds
6. Don’t Feel Right
7. Six Mistakes
8. Crusader
9. Dress Yourself
10. Untidy Creature
Sleater-Kinney Tour Dates:
Nov 10, 2023 – London, UK – Pitchfork London Roundhouse
Nov 19, 2023 – Mexico City, MX – Corona Capital
Feb 28, 2024 – San Diego, CA – The Observatory North Park
Feb 29, 2024 – Las Vegas, NV – Brooklyn Bowl
Mar 1, 2024 – Tempe, AZ – Marquee Theatre
Mar 2, 2024 – Albuquerque, NM – El Rey Theater
Mar 4, 2024 – Tulsa, OK – Cain’s Ballroom
Mar 5, 2024 – Dallas, TX – Studio at the Factory
Mar 6, 2024 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at the Moody Theater
Mar 8, 2024 – New Orleans, LA – Joy Theater
Mar 9, 2024 – Atlanta, GA – The Eastern
Mar 11, 2024 – Norfolk, VA – The NorVa
Mar 12, 2024 – Washington, DC – The Anthem
Mar 13, 2024 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
Mar 14, 2024 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
Mar 16, 2024 – New York, NY – Racket
Mar 17, 2024 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
Mar 18, 2024 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
Mar 20, 2024 – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall
Mar 21, 2024 – Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre
Mar 22, 2024 – Madison, WI – The Sylvee
Mar 23, 2024 – St. Paul, MN – Palace Theatre
Mar 25, 2024 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman
Mar 26, 2024 – Denver, CO – Mission Ballroom
Mar 28, 2024 – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern
Mar 29, 2024 – Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco
Mar 30, 2024 – San Francisco, CA – The Warfield
Mar 31, 2024 – San Francisco, CA – The Warfield
Apr 2, 2024 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox
Apr 3, 2024 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox
Apr 4, 2024 – Vancouver, BC – The Vogue
Apr 5, 2024 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom
Wild Nothing shared a new single, ‘Dial Tone’, taken from his upcoming full-length Hold. It follows the previously released tracks ‘Suburban Solutions’ and ‘Headlights On’ featuring Hatchie. Check it out via the Min Soo Park-directed visual below.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have announced that their latest album, The Silver Cord, will be released on October 27. The album’s opening suite – ‘Theia’, ‘The Silver Cord’, and ‘Set’ – is out today alongside an accompanying video. Check it out below.
The new LP, which follows June’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, will be available in two versions. “The first version’s really condensed, trimming all the fat,” Stu Mackenzie explained in a press release. “And on the second version, that first song, ‘Theia,’ is 20 minutes long. It’s the ‘everything’ version – those seven songs you’ve already heard on the first version, but with a whole lot of other shit we record while making it. It’s for the Gizz-heads.”
“I love Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder, and I’d never listen to the short versions now – I’m one of those people who wants to hear the whole thing,” Mackenzie continued. “We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts.”
The Silver Cord Cover Artwork:
The Silver Cord Tracklist:
1. Theia
2. The Silver Cord
3. Set
4. Chang’e
5. Gilgamesh
6. Swan Song
7. Extinction
Ahead of the release of his new album Javelin this Friday, Sufjan Stevens has shared one more single from it, ‘A Running Start’. Featuring additional vocals from Hannah Cohen, Megan Lui and Nedelle Torrisi, the track follows previous entries ‘Will Anybody Ever Love Me?’ and ‘So You Are Tired’. Listen to it below.
Last month, Stevens revealed he had been hospitalized h due to complications from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and is currently undergoing intensive physical therapy to relearn how to walk.
Even when it expands into something grandiose, Oneohtrix Point Never’s music can feel endlessly interior. It’s also part of what Daniel Lopatin, in a recent interview, called “a world of inter-referentiality.” His work can be sonically challenging in a vacuum, but it can also feel alienating as a continuously evolving interrogation of the history of the project itself. His new album, Again, is billed as a “speculative autobiography,” the final installment in a trilogy of albums that includes 2015’s Garden of Delete and 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. One of the most salient references on the album is the organ arpeggios on closer ‘A Barely Lit Path’, which are lifted from R Plus Seven’s ‘Boring Angel’. But when it comes to drawing from the music of his past, Again goes a little farther than those records by leaning into a kind of youthful naivety. “I was really open, a sponge, delighted by possibility – and I had no idea what I was doing,” he has said of his younger self, and the LP serves less as an outline of the possibilities that lay ahead than the magical playground where cluelessness and optimism meet. The results are less conceptually grounded and more meandering, but still hypnotically replete with elements of beauty and surprise.
Whether or not it instantly clicks, it’s refreshing to hear the experimental musician – who has worked on two film scores and recently produced records for everyone from Soccer Mommy to the Weeknd – tread back into the recesses of his own mind in a way that can feel disconnected even from his previous OPN albums. The illogical and fragmented structure of Again mirrors the nature of memory as it likely appeared to him as he finished the album in Accord, New York, surrounded by the New England landscape where he grew up, but it is also animated by the excitement of starting a new life – looking back and forward at the same time. His use of AI tools like OpenAI’s Jukebox, Adobe Enhanced Speech, and Riffusion, which are all credited here, might be a way of winking at the future of AI’s capabilities, but even then, Lopatin is more fascinated by how its failures now can produce sounds that are musically unique and strangely familiar in affect – familiar enough to relate it to his own process. “I’d say, ‘I want you to make a Smashing Pumpkins song.’ It tries, and it can’t,” he explained. “That’s a lot like me.”
Lopatin employs the technology in a casually exploratory way on tracks like ‘The Body Trail’, but lands on something more transcendent on ‘On an Axis’, where an AI-generated loop allows him to dive into shoegaze in thrilling fashion. It’s just one of many unpredictable moments on the album, which begins with the string-led cacophony of ‘Elsewhere’ and hits another peak with ‘Krumville’, a hauntingly pensive, Xiu Xiu-assisted track that descends into something resembling Midwestern emo. But the genre descriptor that looms over much of Again is post-rock, which Lopatin often refracts to eerie, poignant effect. But his excursions, interesting as they may be in the moment, are more so when you take a step back, as memorable and impactful as a dream you can only half-remember. Songs like ‘World Outside’ have both an ambling and disorienting quality to them, evoking the wonder that formlessly lingers through and out of adolescence as he sings, “Isn’t the view so amazing?”
Whatever feeling Lopatin is after on Again, however tied to the past or the future it may be, it seems to accumulate towards the end. Rather than subverting expectations, he mostly succeeds at retaining our attention with playful detours that are grounded in sincerity, but the record’s hopeful, dramatic final stretch elevates the experience. ‘Memories of Music’ strips the confusion off the sentimentality that’s hinted at throughout and that Lopatin came close to embracing on Magic, using his technical mastery to fuse everything that came before it. But it’s ‘A Barely Lit Path’ that best encapsulates Again‘s ethos. The emotion is sweeping, unrestrained, and perfectly set up, approaching catharsis and even a sense of closure. “If I empty my mind/ Do I scoop out my skull/ What gifts would I find/ Nothing’s inside,” he sings, voice swaddled in effects. “Just a slug that provides/ A barely lit path/ From your house to mine.” It’s a simple offer, but Lopatin makes it so that nothing could be more striking than that moment – even the mere possibility – of true connection. That’s a world worth striving toward.
In the Life of Forms exhibition, the Hayward Gallery will showcase how artists have drawn inspiration from movement, flux, and organic growth, from a dancer’s gesture to the breaking of a wave or from molten metal flowing to a spider’s web tangled.
Over 50 years of contemporary art will be showcased in this unique exhibition, including a range of energetic sculptural forms that seem to exude, undulate, blossom, erupt and sprawl in the gallery space, inspiring fluid and transforming experiences. The Life of Forms will bring together works that tackle physical experience in a world where everyday encounters are increasingly digitized in a dynamic and urgent way.
The exhibition will feature the works of 19 international artists, namely Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosquê, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeong Hwa, Tara Donovan, DRIFT, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulène, Senga Nengudi, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay, Teresa Solar Abboud and Franz West.
Talking about the exhibition, Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, said: “Intricate, exuberant and playful, the works in this show will take visitors on an adventure into a world of fascinating forms. Whilst they avoid directly representing the human body, most of these artworks evince a compelling corporeality – they remind us that there is a comedy, as well as a politics, of form.”
The exhibition will run from the 5th of February, 2024, until the 6th of May, 2024.
Truth Club have shared a new single, ‘Siphon’, lifted from their upcoming album Running From the Chase – out this Frday, October 6 via Double Double Whammy. It follows previous cuts ‘Blue Eternal’, ‘Exit Cycle’, and ‘Uh Oh’. Check it out below.
“The process of bringing ‘Siphon’ to life was an exciting one,” drummer Elise Jaffe explained in a statement. “While Travis, Yvonne, and I put together the core structure of the song, Kam was coming back to us with new and crazy guitar lines at every practice that drastically changed the whole feel of the song. The collaborative nature of writing ‘Siphon’ made it feel so fresh for all of us, and reinforced the rewarding nature of making music together as a band.”
