The xx’s Oliver Sim has shared a new song, ‘GMT’, alongside an accompanying video. It’s taken from his forthcoming debut LP Hideous Bastard, following previous offerings ‘Romance with a Memory’, ‘Fruit’, and ‘Hideous’. Check out the clip, directed by Sim’s longtime friend and collaborator Laura Jane Coulson, below.
“‘GMT’ was one of the first songs made for the record,” Sim explained in a press release. “I’d chased Jamie to Australia to escape British winter. We worked in Sydney and road tripped down to Byron Bay, stopping at secluded beaches and listening to a lot of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson on the way. The first song we made was ‘GMT,’ sampling Brian Wilson’s ‘Smile.’ The song was written about pining over a love back home, thousands of miles apart on different time zones. It’s also a love letter to London.”
“I remember hearing the beginnings of ‘GMT’ in 2020 when Oliver was writing the record,” Coulson added. “It’s been in my head ever since. So I was beyond happy when Oliver asked to collaborate on the video for ‘GMT’ (actually my favourite song from the record). We wanted to make something simple and positive that focused on Oliver’s performance. I also wanted to capture his energy and show moments where we see a hint of his off-stage persona. We had so much fun making it.”
Baltimore experimental pop outfit Tomato Flower have released ‘Blue’, a new song lifted from their forthcoming EP Construction. The band announced the collection last month by sharing the title track. Listen to ‘Blue’ below.
Construction is set for release on August 5 via the Philadelphia label Ramp Local. It follows Tomato Flower’s debut EP, Gold Arc, which arrived earlier this year. The physical release will contain the music of both EPs, with artwork by James Patrick Mayer.
Julien Baker has announced a new EP, B-Sides, which is comprised of songs recorded during the sessions for her latest album, 2021’s Little Oblivions. The three-song collection arrives digitally on July 21 via Matador, the same day The Wild Hearts Tour featuring Baker, Angel Olsen, and Sharon Van Etten kicks off. Listen to the previously unreleased track ‘Guthrie’ below, and scroll down for the EP’s cover art.
Waterbaby, the London sister duo composed of Martha and Jessica Kilpatrick, have shared a new single, ‘Thin Air’, their first release on untitled recs. Check it out via the accompanying visual below.
Talking about the song in a statment, Waterbaby said: “It’s a song about duality. We shapeshift from being in the driver’s seat to going along for the ride, ‘am I the pilot, or the passenger?’, and travel from day to night. We use aerial analogies and flight metaphors to describe periods of ascent and descent, and the ups and downs of life. Throughout the song you soar and crash, sometimes looking down on the world below, existing somewhere in the clouds like an angel watching earth.”
Hot Chip have dropped a new track, ‘Eleanor’, the second preview of their upcoming record Freakout/Release, following ‘Down’. Listen to it below.
“It’s about the world smashing into you, waves crashing into you, all-encompassing pain, and how you have to walk through it,” Alexis Taylor said of ‘Eleanor’ in a statement. “The verses are about separation when families are divided against their will. It’s about strong friends. It’s also about Samuel Beckett giving Andre The Giant lifts to school, and about how Beckett must have learned a lot from Andre’s wisdom.”
Freakout/Release is set to arrive on August 19 via Domino.
Rat Tally (aka Addy Harris) has shared a new song called ‘Longshot’, which will appear on her forthcoming debut LP, In My Car. Check it out below.
“This is the opening track and one of my favorites off the record,” Harris explained in a statement. “The song is a lot about anxiety and not being able to stop overthinking, so I wanted the verses to feel tense, lyrically and musically.”
She continued: “’Longshot’ and ‘In My Car’ have a wall of quadrupled power chord guitars that my producer Max Grazier recorded that just absolutely smack you in the face. When I wrote it I was really obsessively listening to Fountains of Wayne, XTC, and a lot of 90s and early 2000s hits, and I wanted it to have a big stadium rock vibe. I had this hook that I hummed in the demo and thought I would eventually write words to it, but it works so much better as just a melody riding on top of the huge guitars.”
In My Car, which features guest appearances from Jay Som and Madeline Kenney, is out August 12 via 6131 Records. It includes the previously released single ‘Spinning Wheel’.
Throughout Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa)’s body of work, she wrestles with the ways dominant conceptions of history and temporality facilitate cycles of oppression. Her catalogue is prolific, including six vastly distinct albums from 2020 alone. Yet each new releases operates with no pulled punches: poetic assailments against the underpinnings of white supremacist narratives. Jazz Codes, her latest album, is a spiritual sequel to last year’s Black Encyclopedia of the Air. Both albums sprout from the theoretical underpinnings of Black Quantum Futurism: a multi-disciplinary project Moor Mother formed with Rasheedah Phillips, which aims to configure a new consciousness based around principles of communal healing, Black feminist liberation, and re-imaginings of both history and temporality. Aptly-titled, Jazz Codes explores the potential of jazz to undo normative aesthetic and social principles, imagining new histories and new futures.
The album is a shift away from the enveloping darkness often attributed to Moor Mother’s catalogue. This isn’t the bleak and furious free jazz of Moor Mother’s Circuit City, wading through the oppressive waters of hyper-corporate, neoliberal housing realities. Instead, Jazz Codes’ songs are breezier than even Black Encyclopedia’s, with more jazz and R&B-influenced production and melodic choruses. The album builds towards something both expansive and immediate. Jazz Codes is Moor Mother at her most optimistic and celebratory, beaming with warmth for her contemporaries, paying tribute to her past idols, and striving towards a radical new consciousness through music and poetry.
For Moor Mother, jazz isn’t a genre unified by fixed conventions. Rather, jazz is an overarching ideal: a Black tradition where instruments push the boundaries of musical convention into free-flowing experiments grounded in collaboration. Jazz Codes begins with Moor Mother’s spoken word murmuring over a hi-hat pattern, the occasional undercurrent of looming saxophone, and the gentle pluck of Mary Lattimore’s harp. It’s a jingly opener, exploring a space between genres which often becomes the album’s home. Jazz Codes’ emotional zenith arrives early with ‘APRIL 7th’. Jazz and ambient elements meld together. Warm drones and airy glitch sounds transition into a blaze of horns and distant rumbles of percussion. “It’s the baritone, the sweet lows/ And sweet chariots coming to take us home,” Moor Mother whispers over the gentle haze of sound. Jazz Codes carves a pathway towards liberation by invoking the fluidity of jazz and reveling in its misty contradictions.
The album is packed with features, highlighting an assortment of voices and musicians into a vast assemblage of stylings. Though Moor Mother’s voice remains a consistent central narration, Jazz Codes emphasizes collective discourse. Radical unities form through artistic collaboration. Moor Mother performs as a bard, guiding us in poem through a futuristic landscape of ruptured temporality. As an MC, the songs tend to align with the energy she offers as a vocalist. The album excels with Moor Mother’s most ferocious, lively verses, like ‘BARELY WOKE’, where she spits about the overwhelming anxieties of trying to fathom a liberated future while inhabiting a suffocating police state. Consistently, Jazz Codes finds Moor Mother experimenting with her voice. On ‘BLUES AWAY’, she tasks her vocals with conveying absolute anguish. Backgrounded by Faboi Sharif’s echoing shouts, Moor Mother navigates the song in a heartbroken moan. Her voice becomes a conduit for absolute loss.
Yet at other points, Moor Mother performs with considerable restraint. On ‘SO SWEET AMINA’, she speak-sings over two separate vocal tracks. The repetitive vocals unfold without the centrality often associated with a vocal line. Rather, Moor Mother’s voice becomes another instrument in the mix, swirling amidst the saxophone and bass. Jazz Codes carefully refutes the individuality of the singular musician, casting Moor Mother’s voice as one instrument amongst a larger orchestra, turning to jazz to bulldoze the structures of late-capitalism. Jazz Codes emphasizes the importance of collective unity in the face of an increasingly fascist state. Liberation, in the end, is never an individual pursuit.
Kassie Krut is the new electronic music project of Palm’s Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt – who released their first song under the moniker in 2020 – and Matt Anderegg, formerly of Mothers and Body Meat. They’ve now released a pair of new tracks, ‘Copycat’ and ‘Killing It’, which were mixed and mastered by Danny Murillo. Give them a listen below.
“This song is a meditation on the cycles we follow all throughout our lives,” Emily Sprague explained in a statement. “As individuals, as families, as humans. The motions we go through that stay the same just set in different scenes. The fears and the dreams that sculpt our journey through this experience of life on earth, and our continually shifting perspective along the way.”
Manny Charlton, founding guitarist of the Scottish hard rock band Nazareth, has died at the age of 80. The guitarist’s grandson, Jamie, confirmed the news on social media, sharing a photo with the caption “RIP Grandad.” No cause of death was provided.
Charlton was born in Andalusia, southern Spain, on July 25, 1941. Having relocated to Dunfermline, Scotland in the 1940s, he co-founded Nazareth in 1968 with singer Dan McCafferty, bassist Pete Agnew, and drummer Darrell Sweet. The band opened for Deep Purple on their 1971 tour and started playing their own headline shows a few years later. Deep Purple’s bassist, Roger Glover, would produce several of the band’s early albums, but Charlton took over for 1975’s Hair of the Dog, which featured the hit title track as well as the ballad ‘Love Hurts’, a cover of the 1960 track by the Everly Brothers.
In the 1980s, Axl Rose enlisted Charlton to produce Guns N’ Roses’ iconic 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction. Though Charlton did not end up producing the final version of the album, the band’s sessions with the guitarist were later included on the 2018 reissue of the LP.
Charlon left Nazareth in 1990, after the band released their 17th studio album, 1989’s Snakes ‘N’ Ladders. He issued his first solo album, Drool, in 1997, and went on to release several other solo records, including 2013’s Hellacious, which featured guest appearances from Tim Bogert, Walfredo Reyes, Jr., Steven Adler, Vivian Campbell, and Robyn DeLarenzo. His final project was the 2018 best-of compilation Creme de la Creme.
