Jeff Rosenstock and his band were the musical guests on last night’s episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers. They performed ‘Scram!’ from Rosenstock’s most recent album, NO DREAM. All the musicians wore masks, with Rosenstock having written ‘Black Lives Matter’ on his with a Sharpie. Check out the performance below.
“The least we deserve in trying times like these is great punk music — punk music that stands for something,” Seth Meyers said while introducing Rosenstock. “This next guy is one of my favorites. He’s angry and urgent and prescient, and while I’m super bummed that he and his band are not here live tonight, at least we will not have to pay for a studio roof that they surely would have ripped off.”
NO DREAM was surprise-released back in May, followed by his 2020 DUMPEP earlier this month.
Following his holiday-themed EP Hark! last year, Andrew Bird has now announced a full-length Christmas LP, also titled Hark!. The 13-track album will include six songs from the EP, as well as seven additional tracks. Among these are covers of John Prine’ ‘Souvenirs’ and John Cale’s ‘Andalucia’, the latter of which you can hear below.
Another one of the tracks is an original called ‘Christmas in April’. Of the song, Bird wrote in a statement: “There’s an original tune I wrote in April during the most disorienting phase of the pandemic, when I couldn’t help but wonder where we’ll be when the holidays come, if we could be together or not. I’ve been writing a lot of songs inspired by this uninspiring predicament. Let’s hope they all become obsolete as soon as possible.”
Speaking of the release as a whole, he added: “Let’s not talk about the dubious motives that might lead an artist to make a holiday record. It’s a complicated relationship many of us have with the holidays and the requisite music we hear. So let’s admit that it’s a utilitarian thing. The music is just one contributing factor to our communal or solitary joy and melancholy. As a musician, it’s an excuse to take a break from writing the next record and indulge in an unapologetically nostalgic exercise.”
Hark! comes out digitally on October 30, with a vinyl edition set to arrive on November 13 via Loma Vista. Check out the cover art and tracklist below.
On October 10, the singer-songwriter will perform his 2005 album Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs live on Seated.
Hark! Cover Artwork:
Hark! Tracklist:
1. Andalucia
2. Alabaster
3. Greenwine
4. Christmas in April
5. Souvenirs
6. Oh Holy Night
7. Mille Cherubini in Coro
8. Night’s Falling
9. Glad
10. Christmas Is Coming
11. White Christmas
12. Skating
13. Auld Lang Syne
First emerging in 2019 as a quartet, Pittsburgh-based dream pop outfit Drauve are now back as a duo consisting of original members Victoria Draovitch and Stephen Grzenda. Returning with a newfound sense of clarity and focus, their latest series of singles – ‘SO LOW’, ‘TRY’, and ‘LMK’ – retain the woozy, ethereal mood that characterises the genre, but also draw more directly from familiar pop textures that serve as a necessary form of escape. On the mellow yet groovy ‘TRY’, Draovitch delivers a honeyed vocal performance as she dreams of planning a getaway but ultimately laments, “I think about it but I’ll never try.” The stand-out ‘LMK’ imbues its infectious refrain – “You said you’d let me know when you get home last night” – with an underlying sense of trepidation, making it Drauve’s most compelling and evocative release to date; the recently unveiled ‘SO LOW’ builds on that feeling of anxiety, bringing those undertones into the forefront with stark vulnerability. One can easily get lost in the sounds of dream pop, but with sticky melodies and emotive songwriting, Drauve manage to rise above.
We caught up with Drauve for this edition of our Artist Spotlight series, where we showcase up-and-coming artists and give them a chance to talk about their music.
How did you form Drauve?
We met at a local show in Pittsburgh in December 2017. After that show, we started hanging out and writing music together. We wrote for about year and a half, then put out our first single for Drauve called ‘Haunted’ in July 2019.
How would you describe your sound without using any genre terms?
I would describe Drauve as having a “wall of sound” aspect to our music. We like our music to have big moments, and encompass the listener in the sounds we’ve chosen for each song. A lot of people also describe our music as “chill”, but I think upon listening to our lyrics our music becomes more existential and anxious-feeling.
Who are some of your biggest influences, both individually and as a group?
Individually, Victoria’s main influences are Hayley Williams and The Cure. Stephen’s influences are The Killers and Steely Dan. As a group, our biggest influences are The Japanese House and Tame Impala.
What’s your creative process like?
We usually record a basic idea on guitar or synth first and loop it so Victoria can write lyrics over it. After that, we’ll usually tackle production ourselves, but sometimes we’ll work with an outsider producer which we did on our song ‘TRY’. Once production is done, Stephen actually mixes the song on his own. We have a home studio, so it makes the creative process feel really comfortable and gives us a lot of freedom to express ourselves.
What was the inspiration for your two latest singles, ‘TRY’ and ‘LMK’?
Both songs were written during March & April of 2020, so it was in the early stages of the coronavirus lockdown. We were working on music nonstop to distract ourselves from the anxiety of the pandemic, and we were also planning a move from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. Having so much anxiety and so much time on our hands definitely had a massive impact on ‘TRY’ and ‘LMK’. Both songs deal with the anxiety of the unknown, and writing them really helped us cope with and reflect on our feelings.
How has the response to the new songs been?
The response to the new songs has been incredible. So many new people have discovered us because of the new songs, and it’s cool to know they’re connecting with something so deeply personal to us. We’re beyond grateful for the support we’ve received, especially considering we’ve only had this project for a little over a year!
What are your plans for the near future?
Well, we recently moved to Los Angeles, so we are just getting adjusted to our new home and working on new music! We just put out a new single on September 22 called ‘SO LOW’, and we will be putting out an EP in early 2021.
21 Savage and producer Metro Boomin are set to release the long-awaited follow-up to Savage Mode this Friday. The album announcement came in the form of a trailer narrated by Morgan Freeman and directed by Gibson Hazard. Check it out below.
In the clip, Freeman reads the following script: “Savage is defined as fierce, beastly, and untamed. Mode is defined as a way of operating or using a system. So to be in savage mode is to go hard, not allowing anything to stop or deter you from your mission. Basically, this means when someone’s in savage mode, they are not to be fucked with.”
21 Savage’s last studio album was 2018’s Grammy-nominated i am > i was. That same year, Metro Boomin released his own solo studio debut, NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES.
Last week, it was announced that K-pop superstars BTS would be appearing for five consecutive nights on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon! They kicked things off last night (September 28) with an a cappella rendition of their latest single, ‘Dynamite’, joined by Fallon and The Roots, followed by a closing performance of the Love Yourself: Answer track ‘Idol’. Check it out below.
Bat for Lashes — aka Natasha Khan — has released a cover of the Carpenters’ ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’. Khan started performing the track live around 2016, but this marks her first proper studio recording of the hit song. Take a listen below.
According to an Instagram post announcing the cover, the singer-songwriter recorded her vocals and the piano in Los Angeles during lockdown, while the strings were arranged by Hugh Brunt and performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra. The track was co-produced by Khan and TJ Allen.
‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ originally appeared on the Carpenters’ sophomore album Close to You. Bat for Lashes released her most recent studio LP, Lost Girls, last year.
Deerhoof have surprise-released a new covers album titled Love-Lore. It’s a 35-minute, 43-track LP recorded as a medley live in the studio. The album is now available digitally via Joyful Noise. Listen to it below.
Recorded in one afternoon at Manhattan’s Rivington Rehearsal Studios, the band had previously debuted the medley the previous night at the 2019 Time:Spans Festival. Spanning multiple decades, it includes covers of Ornette Coleman, Beach Boys, Gary Numan, the Police, Kraftwerk, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, the B-52s, the Velvet Underground, Dionne Warwick, and more.
“That concert, in August 2019, in a small hall on the west side of Manhattan, was a special event that I will remember for the rest of my time,” music historian and friend of the band, Benjamin Piekut, wrote in a statement accompanying the release. “I suspect the other 180 people there had a similar feeling. In the first minute or two, I might have caught a fleeting glance from Satomi that wondered, “What have we gotten ourselves into?,” but if such a doubt did exist, it faded quickly. The concert was not brief but it went by in a dazzling flash; I am still amazed that these musicians—all of them, but especially Ed—memorized one hour’s worth of music for a single performance (that’s a lot of notes). At the time, I experienced both of these elements (Satomi’s doubt and Ed’s recall) as contributions to a greater treatise on risk: any real hazard requires uncertainty, demands focus, and invites a response.”
He continued: “Hearing that program again, now as a recording, brings to mind nothing if not Sonic Youth’s 1999 record, Goodbye 20th Century, another album that I hold dear. While Sonic Youth worked from scores by Cage, Wolff, and other composers, Deerhoof takes a more vernacular approach, learning the music of their predecessors by ear, straight off the record, and then revising it in practice. If Sonic Youth cultivated a certain reverence for the ancestors, Deerhoof seems both more skeptical and less respectful—a measure, perhaps, of how the last twenty years have affected our relationships to the modernist projects of futures past.”
Bright Eyes are the latest group to perform on NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series. Conor Oberst and his band performed three songs from their recent comeback record Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was – ‘Mariana Trench’, ‘Pan and Broom’, and ‘Persona Non Grata’ – as well as a track from 2011’s The People’s Key, ‘Shell Games’. Check out their set below.
The performance marks the third time Oberst has appeared on the show, having first appeared in the series in 2014, and then in 2019 with Phoebe Bridgers as Better Oblivion Community Center. Bridgers also returned to Tiny Desk earlier this month, performing as the President against a green-screened Oval Office.
beabadoobee has shared the latest preview from her upcoming album Fake it Flowers. Titled ‘How Was Your Day?’, the song was recorded on a four-track cassette recorder while the singer-songwriter’s studio was closed during the coronavirus lockdown. Check it out below, alongside an accompanying music video.
“’How Was Your Day’ is a track that explores all the relationships I neglected when I was away from home,” beabadoobee explained in a statement. “I wanted to emphasise the rawness of the lyrics with the song sonically which is why I recorded it on a four-track with all the little mistakes and vocal wobbles included. I wanted the music video to feel nostalgic to me, to include all the people I cared about, it took me back to the time I first started making music.”
Fake It Flowers arrives October 16th via Dirty Hit. The 12-track LP will include the previously released singles ‘Care’, ‘Sorry’, and ‘Worth It’.
Billie Eilish has announced a new documentary titled Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. The feature-length film will be released in theaters and on Apple TV+ in February 2021, the singer revealed on Instagram. Check out a teaser below.
The documentary was directed by R.J. Cutler (The September Issue) and will arrive via Apple Original Films in association with Interscope Films, Darkroom, This Machine, and Lighthouse Management & Media.
