Soccer Mommy has released color theory(selected demos), a 6-track collection of early versions of songs from her sophomore album color theory. The singer-songwriter has also unveiled a new visual for the demo version of ‘royal screw up’. Check it out below.
“I made this video by driving around and exploring a little bit of Nashville,” Soccer Mommy said about the video in a press release. “Most of the footage is from my house or my favorite nearby nature spots.”
In addition to color theory (selected demos), Soccer Mommy has also announced a limited edition blue vinyl version of color theory, as well as a deluxe binder edition of color theory (selected demos), featuring six flexi discs, a handwritten lyric sheet, stickers, a pencil case with pencils, rulers, and erasers. Along with ‘royal screw up (demo)’, the surprise release also includes the demo versions of singles ‘circle the drain’, ‘crawling in my skin’, and ‘yellow is the color of her eyes’.
color theory arrived back in February. In May, Soccer Mommy launched a new Singles Series, which saw her collaborate with the likes of Jay Som, beabadoobee, SASAMI, and others. She recently shared a new video for ‘crawling in my skin’.
Sharon Van Etten has shared her own take on two holiday classics: ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Blue Christmas’. Listen to both covers below.
“The holidays are just around the corner, and since I’m always late to the party, I thought I’d share two holiday songs I recorded,” Van Etten wrote on Instagram. “Nothing really beats the Bob Dylan Christmas record for me — but I hope they bring you joy.”
The singer-songwriter originally recorded her version of ‘Silent Night’ in 2018 for Eric Paschal Johnson’s short film The Letter, while ‘Blue Christmas’ appeared on a 2009 benefit LP called Do You EAR what I Ear. Both tracks are now available on streaming services for the first time.
Last month, Van Etten released a new song for Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man called ‘Let Go’. Back in September, she shared a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ for National Suicide Prevention Month.
Phil Elverum has announced a new photo book to accompany his most recent album Microphones in 2020. It’s titled Microphones in 2020 Silent Versionand it compiles 761 images taken from the short film of the same name. Below, check out a trailer for the book and read Elverum’s in-depth statement.
Microphones in 2020 Silent Version is set for release on December 25. Microphones in 2020, which arrived back in August, marked Elverum’s first album under The Microphones moniker in 17 years, following 2003’s Mount Eerie.
My teenage job was working in the darkroom at The Business, a weird little camera/book/record shop in Anacortes. I sat in the dark and listened to my Eric’s Trip and This Mortal Coil tapes and made black and white enlargements of peoples’ torn ancestor portraits, hunched over in the fumes and squinting through a loupe at grains of grey. I took h0me expired film and weird old cameras and always kept them with me from then on, even now. As life evolved into always traveling, touring, diving into the days, I took hundreds of pictures. Thousands? The 4×6” prints were taped to the bedroom walls, the door, the car, the guitar, everywhere.
As I made songs and albums these photographs stood in for the unmade movie that I was always soundtracking. Each photo, for me, contained an expanse of music and ideas, mostly unexpressed but always waiting, ripe. In my mind at least, some images are directly married to a specific song or musical moment but most just float as part of the vast wash of atmosphere in which all of these recordings have grown, hundreds of 4×6” windows into a world of multicolored grain, cloud and wave wall, phantoms in twilight, a real world exaggerated through long exposures and low light into a revelation of an unknown one.
In the summer of 2020 I organized 761 of the old photos into a careful sequence synced up with the long new Microphones song and this became the video. A few seconds for each image flopped down, a fragement of the autobiographical lyrics subtitled down below. This flood of images felt too unrelenting so I decided to make a book to allow people to turn the pages at their own pace, and to hear the song silently. It can work in conjunction with the album, a libretto, and it can also work as just a book of images with no story, an abundance of beautiful light, an “art book”.
Technical specifics: the camera is a Mercury Univex II half frame 35mm camera, the film is expired 800 speed Kodak, the prints are pre-2004 cheap lab optical light onto paper in chemicals. Around 2004 the global move to digital printing ended this pursuit of distorted walls of fog; the gradients got ugly. In book form the photos are printed at actual size. The text is unobtrusively small. The dustjacket removes to reveal hidden tiny text specifying additional information about each image (where known). There’s a golden ribbon to mark your place. The heavy hardcover binding is wrapped in black cloth and stamped with gold foil on the cover and spine. This book is a substantial brick.
It’s a culmination of a lifetime still underway. I’m still taking pictures in the weird low light with the same obsolete camera, finding ways. The pursuit continues, the path through distortion and grain twists forward.
Megan Thee Stallion has announced her debut album. It’s calledGood News and it arrives next week, Friday, November 20. Check out the album cover below.
The rapper teased the album on social media on Wednesday, November 11th, before confirming it with an Instagram post on the 12th. “Hotties, I first want to say thank you for riding with me, growing with me, and staying down with me since my first mixtape Rich Ratchet!” she wrote in the caption. “Through this rough ass year, we’ve all been having I felt like we could all use a lil bit of good news. So with that being said, my official album Good News is dropping November 20th.”
Good News marks Meg’s proper debut studio LP following a series of mixtapes and EPs, the most recent of which, Suga, dropped in March. Earlier this year, she also released the Beyoncé-featuring remix of ‘Savage’ and joined Cardi B for the smash hit ‘WAP’. More recently, she linked up with Young Thug for the track ‘Don’t Stop’ and performed on Saturday Night Live.
As teased, Lil Nas X has shared a brand new song called ‘Holiday’, his first solo single in more than a year. It arrives with a futuristic Gibson Hazard-directed music video set on Christmas eve in the North Pole, with the rapper taking on the role of Santa Claus as he oversees his team of robotic elves. Watch it below.
Following the viral success of ‘Old Town Road’ in the spring of 2019, Lil Nas X released his debut 7 EP last June. Earlier this year, he won the Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for his ‘Old Town Road’ remix with Billy Ray Cyrus.
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on November 13th, 2020:
AC/DC, POWER UP
AC/DC are back with their seventeenth studio album, POWER UP, out now via Columbia. It’s the first album to feature the band’s surviving classic line-up of Brian Johnson, Phil Rudd, Cliff Williams, and Angus Young since 2008’s Black Ice. Though the late guitarist Malcolm Young did co-write 2014’s Rock or Bust, he did not appear on the album due to his declining health. In 2015, Rudd left AC/DC following legal issues, and a year later, Johnson had to exit the band’s tour due to hearing loss. POWER UP includes the previously released singles ‘Shot in the Dark’ and ‘Realize’ and was made in collaboration with producer Brendan O’Brien, who also worked on the band’s previous two albums.
BENEE, Hey u x
BENEE has come through with her debut studio album, Hey u x, out now via Republic. The New Zealand artist’s 13-track LP features guest contributions from Lily Allen, Grimes, Flo Milli, Gus Dapperton, Mallrat, Kenny Beats, Bakar, and Muroki and includes the previously released singles ‘Happen to Me’, ‘Plain’, ‘Supalonely’, ‘Night Garden’, and ‘Snail’. The album was made over the course of New Zealand’s two lockdown periods; it was the intimate nature of the creative process that inspired its title. “I feel like ‘Hey u x’ is something that you send to a mate, or someone you have a thing with,” BENEE said in an interview with FLOOD Magazine. “I wanted this album to feel very personal to whoever is listening to it. I want it to feel like a conversation between them and I.”
Chris Stapleton, Starting Over
Chris Stapleton has released his new album, Starting Over, out now via Mercury Records Nashville. Completed in late February just days before lockdown began, the follow-up to 2017’s From A Room: Volume 1 and 2 contains fourteen tracks, including covers of John Fogerty’s ‘Joy Of My Life’ and Guy Clark’s ‘Worry B Gone’. “This record has a lot of depth in it,” Stapleton told Tenessean. “It has a lot of variance in tone and music. It feels a little a bit like not a complete departure, but a little different lane to some of the things we’ve done. But it still very much sounds like the things that we do.”
Told Slant,Point The Flashlight and Walk
This is the third album from Told Slant, the folk-rock project of Brooklyn songwriter Felix Walworth. Their first album in four years, Point The Flashlight and Walk is out now via Double Double Whammy and follows 2016’s Going By. The album was mixed by KT Pipal and mastered by Josh Bonati, while the cover artwork was created by Thea Kliros and Amalia Soto. Prior to its release, Told Slant shared the singles ‘Family Still’, ‘No Backpack’, ‘Run Around The School’, and ‘Whirlpool’.
Pink Siifu & Fly Anakin, FlySiifu’s
Pink Siifu & Fly Anakin have teamed up for a new collaborative project titled FlySiifu’s, out now via Lex Records. Centered around the concept of the two prolific rappers running a fictional record store, the album features guest appearances from Liv.e, $ILKMONEY, Fousheé, and B. Cool-Aid, as well as production credits from Madlib, Jay Versace, Richmond beatmaker Graymatter, and more. It includes the previously released tracks ‘Dollar Dr. Dream’, ‘Mind Right’, and ‘Richard Pryor’.
Billie Eilish is back with a new song called ‘Therefore I Am’. The follow-up to ‘my future’ arrives with a self-directed music video shot at the deserted Glendale Galleria, where Eilish used to hang during her early teens. Check it out below.
Run the Jewels have shared a new track called ‘No Save Point’. It’s taken from the soundtrack for Polish video game developer CD Projekt Red’s long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077. Each of the musicians who contributed original music have taken on alter egos to fit into the game’s dystopian setting, and the duo of El-P and Killer Mike appear not as Run the Jewels but Yankee & the Brave (in reference to their RTJ4 track of the same name). Check out ‘No Save Point’ below.
As part of Run the Jewels’ collaboration with Cyberpunk, the duo is releasing an exclusive merch line with RTJ-inspired images that feature in the game, including a RTJ x CP heavyweight hoodie, t-shirts, and accessories. The limited Run The Jewels x Cyberpunk 2077 collection launches this weekend.
RTJ4, the group’s latest studio album, dropped back in June. Cyberpunk 2077 was originally scheduled for release on April 16, but has been pushed back multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The game is now set to arrive on December 10. A$AP Rocky, Nina Kraviz, Grimes, and more also contributed to the soundtrack.
Goldensuns, a band made of brothers Chase, Jantzen, and Weston, have revealed their newest song ‘Cover It Up’ — today. The single is the third to be released before their big EP release in 2021, the last two being ‘Can’t Care Too Much’ and ‘Denandra Moore.’
‘Cover It Up’ is much more of an impassioned, melancholic piece by the band compared to the two previous songs. It’s a reminiscent-like piece that still drives on the dreamy vibe that Goldensuns present throughout discography, imperceptibly juxtaposing to the tension of the current political climate but still maintaining a mood of sadness, bringing us back to the reality of the situation we are facing.
Francis of Delirium – the Canadian-American, Luxembourg-based duo led by 19-year-old Jana Bahrich alongside collaborator Chris Hewett – have announced their sophomore EP, Wading. The follow-up to this year’s All Change EP is for release next February via Dalliance Recordings and includes the newly unveiled single ‘Lakes’. Check it out below, alongside an accompanying music video.
“The main idea in ‘Lakes’ is that we are all fed by other people (or other “rivers”) to eventually form who we are, one large lake fed by other water streams, one community,” Bahrich explained in a press release. “Left emptied and lost, you begin to lose your sense of self. Your anchor was the people around you, and now you’re tied to nothing, floating around in a space alone.”
The accompanying visual is made up mostly of footage Bahrich’s grandfather took around the 70s. “Through the music video I wanted to find identity through family and heritage,” she said. “I never really developed a relationship with my grandfather and I found a large sense of self through making the video. Many tears were shed.”
Bahrich previously served as the songwriter, videographer and artwork creator on All Change, but Wading finds her also taking the role of co-producer. The EP was mixed by Gabe Wax (Adrianne Lenker, Palehound, Squirrel Flower), while Joe Lambert (The National, Sharon Van Etten, Dirty Projectors) handled the mastering.
AC/DC
BENEE
Chris Stapleton
This is the third album from Told Slant, the folk-rock project of Brooklyn songwriter Felix Walworth. Their first album in four years, 
Pink Siifu
