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9 Ways to Break Your Smartphone Addiction

Smartphones are powerful tools that can make our lives a lot easier. Most of us can’t imagine a life without one, as we use them for everything, like keeping in touch with friends, setting up appointments, shopping, reading news, and many more. On average, the typical smartphone user spends 3 hours 15 minutes on the phone every day.

Do you think it would be easy for you to put down your phone and just walk away? If not, you are not alone. Nowadays, many people struggle with smartphone addiction. A phone overuse can reduce the quality of conversations you have in real life, negatively impact sleep quality, and impact your short-term memory.

Here, you will find nine ways to break your smartphone addiction, including using apps to bolster your self-control, quitting charging your phone near the bed, or putting your phone away when you walk through the door. Keep reading and overcome your addiction!

Get Rid of Social Media Apps

Social media apps are a big part of our smartphones’ lives. These include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. The most important thing you can do to break your smartphone addiction is to delete all social media apps from your phone. This way, you will avoid the temptation of checking them when you are bored or stressed.

Another option is to put a password on social media applications, so it will get tiring for you to key in a password every time you want to check anything. It is recommended to leave only those websites and applications that give your real value, the latest news in your country or the world, or learning websites, for example, Wealthy Gorilla.

Use Your Time Efficiently

Your smartphone takes up a lot of your free time that you basically waste. Instead, try focusing on something useful that can elevate your skills and expertise. You can invest time and money in yourself by reading books that are one of the best distractions from news and social media. Feel free to use Waterstones discount code and search for the engaging book of your choice.

Turn off All Notifications

The first thing you can do to break your smartphone addiction is to turn off all notifications on your phone. This way, you will focus on what’s happening around you and not on your phone. In addition, it will reduce the temptation to check your phone every few minutes, thus reducing the potential damage to your mental health.

It is easier to say “no” to notifications than to your smartphone. Most apps send you a notification every time anything happens in the app. If you have hundreds of apps on your phone, it is easy to get distracted by those notifications, especially if they contain interesting news or offers.

So, turn off all notifications and only check your messages once or twice per day. If you really need to be notified about everything that happens in your apps, consider using an app like Unify to filter the events that matter and send you notifications about them.

Use a Smartphone App to Track Your Phone Usage

There are many apps you can use to track your smartphone usage. Moment is the most popular one in this category, although there are some others, like Break Free, Checky, and more. All of them allow you to set limits on how much time you spend on your phone each day. Once you reach the time limit, your smartphone will block notifications and lock you out of the app.

Use an App to Boost Your Self-Control

There are many free apps that can help strengthen your self-control. One of them is AppDetox. With this app, you will set a target usage time, such as 30 minutes a day and limit yourself from using other apps for the rest of the day. If you try to use an app outside of your usage time, the app will block it until the time is over. Start using it today and watch how much more productive you will be.

Charge Your Phone Elsewhere

Why do you keep your phone near the bed? If you can’t answer this question, it’s time for you to quit doing it. Eventually, charging your phone near the bed will result in less sleep quality. For example, at night, when you wake up in the middle of the night, you may check your phone and go back to sleep with it next to you. This will impact your sleep quality and make your mind distracted in the morning.

Don’t Check Your Phone During Meal Times

One of the biggest smartphone addictions is checking a phone while eating meals. It is a bad habit because it makes you more distracted and less focused on conversations with your family and friends. After some time, you realize that you lost so much precious time that you couldn’t get back again. To stop this bad habit, try putting your phone in another room during meal times and enjoy the company of those who care about you.

Quit Checking Your Phone When You Are Waiting for Something

It is hard to resist checking your phone when you are waiting for something, like for a friend to arrive or something else. One way to help yourself stop doing this is to set a timer for yourself before you start waiting for something and then switch off your phone once the timer goes off. This way, you will avoid checking your phone while waiting and stay more focused on what is going on around you.

Lock Your Smartphone With a Password at Night

You can use a password to lock your phone so that no one else can check your social media accounts or surf the Internet after you go to bed. This way, you won’t be tempted to check your phone when you wake up in the middle of the night.

Another idea would be to download an application that allows you to lock your phone with a mathematical exercise to complete before you can unlock your phone.

Put Your Phone Under Your Pillow When You Sleep

It may sound odd, but putting your smartphone under your pillow will help you disconnect from it at night. The most common reason for checking our phones at night is that we wake up in the middle of the night and just want to check the time. If you put your phone under the pillow and go to sleep, you can’t see what time it is, so you won’t be tempted to check your apps, social media or email.

Conclusion

There are so many ways you can reduce your phone usage during the day – all you need is a strong will to resist the temptation of checking your phone. Download proper applications that help you combat your phone addiction. Implement these nine tips into your everyday life, and you will notice a boost in your mood and concentration.

13 Best Stills from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1980, Apocalypse Now offers a unique window of perspective on warfare. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the film follows Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his secret expedition to the thick of the Vietnam jungle, where he must assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

Kurtz is presumed to be insane, especially after going rogue and committing war crimes and murder. Though director Francis Ford Coppola claims that Apocalypse Now is not an anti-war film, it’s very interested in portraying the bizarre and almost comic double standards of war. Considered by many to be a masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest war movie of all time, today the film doesn’t seem quite so flawless. The portrayal of its Vietnamese characters is questionable, but a step ahead of its predecessors. It also set a precedent for future Vietnam War stories told from an American perspective in terms of humanization and sophistication. Apocalypse Now also features multiple Black characters with developed arcs and personalities.

The gloomy, brooding cinematography helps to tell a story that doesn’t glorify a false American victory and depicts the downward spiral of its characters as they disappear into the thick of the jungle.

The Psychological Benefits of Art in Your Home

Home decor has been transformed from a fashion symbol to a reflection of ourselves. Where before we had to adhere to the strict rules of decorating, the world has now shifted to accept almost all types of expression, giving us the room and freedom to figuratively (and sometimes literally) just breathe. It has now become our safe space, our bubble of calm, or our nook of escape. And this is why what we hang on the walls is as important as what we put on the floors. Specifically, our paintings of choice.

They can be picked up at thrift stores, alleyway art galleries, or at a small stall while on vacation, but we often hang items to our walls that we find peculiar, pretty, or endearing. Surprisingly, what we hang up there has a tremendous impact on our day-to-day life, specifically our moods.

The good and the bad of viewing art

We all know the benefits of creating art. Any creative endeavour will inevitably have a positive effect on the brain, but what fewer people realise is that simply viewing art has benefits in itself.

When viewing art, blood flow to the brain increases by around 10%, meaning our higher cognitive functions are far more active.

Art can also give you a dopamine boost. When looking at particularly beautiful or enticing art, our brain releases a form of dopamine, and some believe the chemical reaction, mixed with our own emotional responses can give the same effect as falling in love!

For homes that are dull and dreary, art can easily spruce them up, but the effects go further than that. In a home filled with art, inspiration is closer than ever. By hanging art on your walls, you can easily find yourself inspired to try something for yourself – and we all know the benefits of exploring our own creativity.

It can also alleviate stress, and help with your mental well-being. Even depression can be alleviated for a little while by staring at a painting if you’ve chosen the correct piece.

But therein lies the key; ‘picking the correct piece’. The only way to truly find benefit from art is to choose something that not only evokes emotion but evokes the correct emotion.

Researchers at UC Irvine made a study into the impact of bombings. Essentially they exposed people to an array of images, all depicting bombings. They found that by staring at disturbing images we can develop a form of PTSD – or at least you were more likely to cite PTSD as the problem. Disturbing images have a profound effect on the brain.

What is even more interesting is that certain images can encourage action, an emotional and moral black and white reaction to the subject matter. So, if we were to hang such a painting in our bedroom or living room, we might find ourselves often trying to solve the problem in the subject matter, and it might cause some distress over time.

Because of this, we need to be careful when picking our art, lest we end up picking something that upsets us in the long run.

So how do you choose the correct art for your home?

By browsing. It’s pretty simple, but the more you look at art the more you will realise what sparks that wonderful connection. Try and ask yourself; “What emotion am I feeling right now?” Anything that is calming or happy or contented is good. These types of paintings are excellent for the home and will help you bring that sense of beauty and calm you’re striving for.

Anything that is confusing, shocking, or uncomfortable should be given a pass. As stated above, pictures have a profound effect on our minds, and some art pieces are meant to create uncertainty and discomfort – but these are not necessarily meant for the home.

But if you’re desperate to hang Goya’s “Saturn devours his children” in your home, a good idea would be to put it somewhere where you won’t see it every day, or where such emotion will not be unwelcome. In your home gym perhaps, or even in your art studio – somewhere where this type of panting will enhance and not disturb. Certain ‘unwanted’ emotions can be very welcome in the correct setting.

Choosing the correct art for your home comes down to what you want to feel every time you look at it.

Buying any old thing to stick to the wall is not always the best course of action. Art is extremely personal, and it must be something that evokes the right type of emotion for you.

Considering the effects of colours

The colour of your painting will have a profound impact on not only the feel of the room but also on your emotions.

We often forget that colours in of themselves have an intense effect on our psyche, which is why red is used for warning signs and soft blue for a baby shower. At the same time, pastels are often used in living rooms as they are calming, and brighter colours can be found in kitchens or children’s playrooms to excite energy.

Although very few empirical studies have been made into colour psychology, what can be said is that colours have an effect on us, and part of that effect goes hand in hand with our own experiences. The colour orange might evoke a feeling of bravery and vibrance for some, while for others it could evoke instead nausea or aggression.

But with or without empirical studies, colours do have an effect. Red, for instance, tends to get people to react faster – which is why it is used so often in advertisements. It encourages a call to action. Passion, both on spectrums of love and anger, can be found in the colour red.

Blue in turn can suggest stability and safety, calmness and healing. Different shades will, of course, create different effects. But the core essence of the colour should remain stable.

What all this means is that your painting might be evoking certain emotions not due to the subject matter, but because of the colours. Some people are more susceptible to the influence of colour than others, so if you find a print you like, perhaps try and find out if you can change it to a lighter or darker tone for your bedroom.

Conclusion

In the end, our decisions for art are indicative of our own experiences, our own stories, sensitivities, and our current emotional state. Whatever you pick, be sure that when you look at it – whatever it evokes – it does not exacerbate those darker places in our minds we often tend to dwell in.

Justin Bieber and Lil Baby to Headline Made in America Festival 2021

After being in canceled in 2020, Made In America, the two-day Philadelphia festival curated by JAY-Z and produced by Roc Nation, has announced the lineup for its September 2021 edition. Justin Bieber and Lil Baby are headlining this year’s event, which will also feature performances from Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion, Roddy Ricch, Bobby Shmurda, Baby Keem, Lil Durk, A$AP Ferg, Moneybagg Yo, Freddie Gibbs, Tinashe, Morray, 42 Dugg, EST Gee, and more. Tickets are on sale now. Check out the lineup below.

In a statement accompanying the announcement of this year’s festival last month, JAY-Z said: “We are thrilled to announce Made in America 2021 on the legendary Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This year will be like no other, as Made in America celebrates 10 years of music history making moments. The artists’ performances will be even bigger and Cause Village will host a wider range of amazing philanthropic organisations. We look forward to sharing incredible memories with our festival attendees and the city of Philadelphia.”

Coldplay Share New Acoustic Version of ‘Higher Power’

Coldplay have shared a new acoustic version of their latest single ‘Higher Power’. Listen to it below.

The official studio cut of ‘Higher Power’ came out on May 7, marking the band’s first piece of new music since their 2019 album Everyday Life. A futuristic video for the track, which is set to appear on their as-yet-untitled ninth studio album, arrived on June 8. The new version of ‘Higher Power’ comes ahead of Coldplay’s in-person performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this Wednesday (June 16).

Tyler, the Creator Shares New ‘Side Street’ Teaser Video

Tyler, the Creator has shared a new teaser video titled ‘SIDE STREET’ on his Twitter page and YouTube channel. The clip shows Tyler kissing a woman while holding a dog before driving off in a pink car. It features an appearance from Odd Future mainstray Taco Bennett, who walks up to the woman and asks, “Baby, who the fuck was that?” The video concludes with the phrase “Call Me If You Get Lost.” Check it out below.

Since the release of his 2019 album IGOR, Tyler, the Creator has released the singles ‘BEST INTEREST’ and ‘GROUP B’, as well as the Coca-Cola ad track ‘Tell Me How’. He also teamed up with Channel Tres on ‘Fuego’ and Brent Faiyaz on ‘Gravity’.

Little Simz Shares New Song ‘Rollin Stone’

Little Simz is back with a new single from her upcoming album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. It’s called ‘Rollin Stone’, and you can check it out below.

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, which follows 2019’s GREY Area LP and last year’s Drop 6 EP, is set to arrive on September 3 via Age 101. Little Simz previously shared the singles ‘Introvert’ and ‘Woman’, both of which landed on our Best New Songs segment.

Interview: Christopher Rea

In the early months of 2020, I stumbled upon a YouTube channel called Modern Chinese Cultural Studies, run by literary and cultural historian Christopher Rea. I had developed a recent interest in Chinese silent movies and was delighted to find this YouTube channel chock full of such movies. Some I’d seen, others I’d only read about—all accompanied by newly translated English subtitles that were often quite different from subtitles I’d previously seen on the market.

Over the next year, Rea—a professor of Chinese at the University of British Columbia—and his team continued to upload Chinese films from the 1920s-40s (including sound pictures), and it was during this time that I discovered the YouTube channel was actually part of a much larger project. In addition to providing improved subtitles for the films, Rea was building out a (still-growing) website and a free online film course. A plethora of information, free to access for anyone interested in early Chinese film history.

It was also around this time that I learned the project had begun with Rea’s latest book, Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949, now available from Columbia University Press. Our Culture reached out to Rea to discuss the book, the YouTube channel, the difficulties of properly translating Chinese films, and what he hopes to achieve in the long run.

In starting off, could you tell us about your interest in Chinese film began? How did your interest lead to the book Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949?

I’ve been interested in Chinese films since high school. I was a Chinese Language and Literature major in college, and continued doing Chinese literary studies in graduate school. I watched a few 5th generation Chinese films of the 1980s and ‘90s during that time, and found them fascinating. As for this particular book project: I’d written a book about the history of laughter and humor in China in the early 20th century, The Age of Irreverence (2015). Laughter is not strictly a literary thing—it spans forms and genres—so I watched a lot of films, too. I liked a lot of the films I saw and became interested in doing a project on them.

Your book covers fourteen Chinese films made in the years 1922-1949. How did you choose the films, and why did you choose that particular set of dates?

There have been a lot of chronological histories of film in China—from the early days to the present—but I really wanted to focus on films as texts and treat each film fully. If you include more chapters and cover more films, either you’re going to end up with an enormous encyclopedia, or you’ll give short shrift to each film. So, I tried to strike a balance.

There are only so many early Chinese films that 1) survived the fires of war, and 2) have been released from the archives. The date 1922 was set by availability: the earliest complete Chinese film that is fully available, Laborer’s Love, is from 1922. As for 1949, that was an obvious point to stop, because the new Communist government set in motion huge shifts in cultural policies at that time. These changes (which took several years to implement) impacted not only filmmakers but studios, which had been private and were suddenly nationalized. Virtually all filmmaking became subject to top-down government directives, culminating in a major re-org in 1952.

I chose my favorites from what’s available and devoted each chapter to a particular film. I talk about how the films relate to Hollywood cinemas and to European cinemas—and what was going on in China at the time, including efforts to articulate an indigenous cinematic style. Each chapter tries to understand the film 1) as a work of art, and 2) within the historical context of its production and reception. The book is very much a starting point for people interested in Chinese film history.

As Rea articulates in his book, po gua (“split the melon”) is a Chinese metaphor for taking a woman’s virginity. So the filmmakers showing this lovesick man cutting a melon in half was a clever bit of sexual innuendo.

How did the book project lead to the YouTube channel? Also, some of the films you’ve subtitled have already been given subtitled DVD releases. Why did you choose to re-subtitle them?

I’d been teaching Chinese films for about a decade and had been constantly frustrated by the poor quality subtitles on the market. A couple of private companies distributed these films in North America, but the subtitles were uniformly bad—inaccurate or incomplete. They would translate dialogue but not text onscreen—so if there was a shop sign, you wouldn’t know what it says. I’d been waiting in vain since graduate school for someone to properly translate these films. Eventually, I decided just to do it myself.

I translated all the films discussed in the book (with the exception of New Women [1935], translated by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow) and made them available on the channel, which I was able to do because the underlying rights for the films are out of copyright. (Some archives retain copyright over particular copies or restored versions, which I can only use with permission.) I had started the Modern Chinese Cultural Studies YouTube channel in 2017, mostly for uploading videos of UBC research on China. It wasn’t until around 2020 that I started updating it in earnest with full films, film clips, and video lectures.

I have now created a Chinese Film Classics website, which contains all of the translated films; a complete, semester-long open-access course with 22 video lectures; and additional resources. So, I suggest that anyone interested in early Chinese film history start there.

Similar question: some of the silent films you’ve translated were originally released with bilingual intertitles—with Chinese on the top and English on the bottom. Why did you choose to re-translate films that were originally released with their own English translations?

What I discovered about the Chinese-English intertitles was that they are also inaccurate/incomplete, or they use archaic English. Also, there was no standardized rendering of Chinese names back then. Filmmakers weren’t using the Wade-Giles romanization system, and stars were often given different English names—so if you only read English, you don’t know who they’re talking about. Who is “Lily Yuen”? Oh, it’s famous actress Ruan Lingyu. Who is “C.Y. Sun”? Oh, it’s leading director Sun Yu. In translating the intertitles, I include pinyin [the current standard romanization system for Chinese characters] for names and point out differences between the Chinese and the English text. Representing such differences creates a unique copy of the film.

It’s fascinating to me that bilingual intertitling of Chinese silent films dies out after a certain point. Silent films of the mid-1930s tend to feature Chinese intertitles only, indicating they weren’t made for a bilingual market to the same degree.

Ruan Lingyu in Goddess (1934).

What are some of the difficulties of translating Chinese to English? Is translation a matter of simply matching words, or is it more complicated?

I think it would be interesting to cut loose Google Translate on one of these films and see what results. Language changes over time, spoken speech versus written speech changes. So, there’s rather archaic-sounding Chinese in the films that doesn’t sound like 21st century Chinese. You also have slang, instances of classical Chinese, instances of dialect that don’t make sense. It’s really quite a mix, and that’s part of the fun—and the challenge—in translating these films. You have to be familiar with the idiom of that time period.

For example, when a character in Long Live the Missus! (1947) says, “Such-and-such a film is playing at the Mei qi,” viewers will wonder: ‘What’s the Mei qi?’ If you translate it phonetically, viewers will have no clue. You have to know they’re referring to a certain Shanghai cinema of yesteryear—the Majestic. So, there’s historical research involved, and I spent a lot of time reading 1920s-40s Chinese magazines and newspaper advertisements.

Another challenge is that some of the films show signs of censorship. Sometimes the editing seems to have left something out. And this raises interesting questions about what was preserved and what wasn’t—and when. What was changed in the Republican era in the 1920s-40s [by government censors, or by filmmakers themselves], and what was changed by the China Film Archive when they released the films in the 1980s and ‘90s?

Since you mentioned dialect, did dialects make translating the sound films difficult in any way?

You did have regional language markets back then—Cantonese markets, for instance—but it wasn’t a huge factor with these Shanghai films. Some of the major studios, like United Photoplay Services (Lianhua), were closely tied to the Nationalist government and supported efforts to promote guoyu, a national spoken language. So they trained actors to speak a certain way—with mixed success. In certain instances, the dialogue is very slow and halting.

Now, there are dialect jokes. In Crows and Sparrows (1949), there’s a Shanghainese dialect joke about the pronunciation of the word pay-nee-shee-ling (“penicillin”). A character remarks that in Shanghainese, “penicillin” it sounds like  “dead man coming up.” That’s a clear dialect joke.

The main difficulty is often the poor quality of the sound recording. Sometimes the dialogue is hard to comprehend and you can hear the whir of the camera in the background. We’re currently translating a film from the 1930s which has very poor sound. First you need a Chinese transcription of the dialogue, then you need to translate it, then double-check everything. In some cases, Chinese scholars have compiled the complete works of directors like Zheng Junli, including all of the screenplays. But the screenplay and the actual film do not always match. So you can’t rely solely on the screenplay for translating. All of my translations are based on the film itself.

The penicillin joke of Crows and Sparrows (1949).

When I watched your subtitled copy of Sports Queen (1934), I noticed that you rendered instances of scatological humor that were missing in the subtitles for Cinema Epoch’s DVD of the same film. Was preserving nuances such as these another intention in translating?

I’m very much about preserving the integrity of the text. So when the original Chinese says chu gong (“take a dump”), I’m going to translate that. As you mentioned, the subtitles on the Cinema Epoch Sports Queen DVD completely cut that out—I’m presuming for prudish reasons. I feel that if it’s there, we should translate it and then we can debate whether we like it or not. If you silently omit anything, I think you’re doing a disservice to the text and the viewer.

In Sports Queen, there are also instances where they try to represent funny sounds in the intertitles. There’s a scene where a westernized young man trying to woo the future sports queen, and he calls her mee-ssu (misi, in pinyin), which the intertitle shows using the characters for “secret shit,” because this is how another character mishears the phrase. But what the speaker means is its homophone, “miss.” So I came up with a way to render the character’s silly over-pronunciation of a western term and preserve the scatological joke.

What is the future of the YouTube channel? What do you hope to accomplish?

There are new films being translated now—some by me, some by other people. I’ve recruited translators from Cambridge, Harvard, universities in Australia, even a high school student on the east coast in the U.S., who is translating two silent martial arts films from the 1920s. I’ve also worked with a couple of my research assistants at UBC: PhD students like Liu Yuqing and Yao Jiaqi, who helped with creating subtitles based on my translations and who worked with me on multiple rounds of revisions for every film.

Translating these films has been labor-intensive. I’ve been doing this nights and weekends for quite a while, but the results have been gratifying. I’ve heard from colleagues across the world, from people who do scoring for silent films. I’ve been contacted by someone who said, “My grandfather was a producer for three of the films on your channel, and I’ve known very little about him. I don’t know Chinese, but now I can appreciate his work through watching these films.”

I’ve also gotten comments on the YouTube videos that have influenced my work. One director of a Chinese music ensemble in the U.S. Midwest pointed out that I was not often including credits for the composers in the YouTube video descriptions. I’d go back to the credits I translated and add those to the descriptions. He also did some research on his own and posted what he found in the YouTube comments. Beyond film history, I hope that this project inspires people to do other open access projects, in whatever field they’re in.

I also hope to enable more dialogue with people who don’t focus on Asian cinema but are experts in other world cinemas. Maybe they haven’t seen Chinese silent movies, but now they can compare and point out things to Asianists. “Hey, you should really check out that Fatty Arbuckle film or that Greta Garbo film, because there’s a resonance here.” This is really a project for educators, students, and the general public.

Lastly, any upcoming events tied to the book?

I will be doing public virtual events in the coming months, including an event on Laborer’s Love (1922) and two events at New York’s China Institute in July, which should be announced soon. I’ll be putting announcements on the YouTube channel, so people who are interested can check for news in the Community section.

But, again, the best place to get acquainted with the overarching project is the Chinese Film Classics website.

Our Culture would like to thank Christopher Rea for this insightful and informative interview. We ask our readers to check out the work that Rea and his colleagues have so ardently pursued. 

Lido Pimienta Covers Björk’s ‘Declare Independence’ for Spotify’s Pride Campaign

Lido Pimienta has shared a cover of Björk’s ‘Declare Independence’, from her 2007 album Volta. It’s part of the second annual Spotify Singles x Pride campaign, Pride 2021: Claim Your Space, which also comes with the release of an original song from Dua Saleh called ‘macrodosing’. Take a listen below. 

“I chose this song mainly because of the lyrics: ‘Wave your flag, raise your flag, higher higher’  and ‘don’t let them do that to you’,” Pimienta explained in a press statement. “I heard this song live and I loved how all the immigrants in the audience were waving their flags. The sense of PRIDE we all felt then, I wanted to carry it through with this version, one that would honour my Caribbean roots and the camp of pride but most importantly, a message of love and revolution in togetherness and acceptance.  Björk has been an inspiration to me, not only as a singer, but as a composer and producer, so this song is also a *thank you* to her for encouraging womxn like me to not be afraid to create my own sonic universe.”

Dua Saleh said of ‘macrodosing’: “This song is about my journey of overcoming challenges both as a trans person and as an independent artist. Lyrically, I claim that the world around me will mold itself to my expansive being. In return, I offer gratitude and pride for the blessings that come my way. When I first wrote it, I couldn’t stop singing it. I felt like I was in a trance. Something moved me to let it out and so it feels extremely nurturing.”

Lido Pimienta’s released her most recent album, Miss Colombia, last year. Dua Saleh’s most recent EP, Rosetta, also arrived last year.

Check out our 50 Best Album Covers of 2020 list, featuring Lido Pimienta’s Miss Colombia at No. 4.

Hand Habits, Duma, and LIDS Share New Tracks for Sub Pop Singles Club

Hand Habits have shared a pair of new tracks, ‘motherless’ and ‘no reply’, as part of Sub Pop’s Singles Club. Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 6 also includes ‘Cannis’ and ‘Mbukinya’ by Nairobi, Kenya’s Duma as well as ‘Furniture’ and ‘Half Twin’ by Canadian supergroup LIDS (featuring Alex Edkins of METZ, Brian Borcherdt of Holy Fuck/Dusted, and Doug MacGregor of Constantines). Check them all out below.

Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy recently launched a new collaborative project with producer Joel Ford called yes/and, whose self-titled LP is out September 23. A new Hand Habits album, produced by Sasami Ashworth, is due out later this year via Saddle Creek.