Travis Scott‘s ‘Franchise’, his new single featuring Young Thug and M.I.A., has debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It marks M.I.A.’s first No. 1 single and her fourth entry into the Hot 100, following ‘Paper Planes’ (No. 4) in 2008, ‘O… Saya’ (No. 93) in 2009, and ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’ (No. 10) in 2012.
‘Franchise’ is also Young Thug’s second No. 1 single, the first one being 2012’s ‘So Much Fun’. Scott has already had three songs peaking at the No. 1 spot within a year – following last October’s ‘Highest In The Room’ and his Kid Cudi collaboration ‘The Scotts’ (which also gave Cudi his first No. 1) – thus setting a new record for the fastest accumulation of No. 1 debuts in the chart’s history.
Having launched with 19.4 million US streams, 98,000 copies sold, and 10.6 million radio impressions in its first week, ‘Franchise’ is the 44th single to debut at No. 1 in the history of the Hot 100, and the ninth to do so this year.
Billie Eilish and FINNEAS were the musical guests on last night’s episode of f The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. They performed the new James Bonde theme ‘No Time To Die’, for which Eilish recently released the music video. The two musicians also sat down to discuss the Grammys, her speech and performance at the Democratic National Convention, and more. Watch it happen below.
“Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange declares on ‘Mossblerd’, the eighth track on his 11-song debut album, Live Forever. By the time we reach that point on the record, though, it’s already kind of an obvious statement – the D.C.-based songwriter and producer does more in the span of half an hour to showcase his eclectic, genre-blending approach than most artists do across their entire discography. Bringing together elements of rock, rap, and electronic music in a way that feels both effortless and refreshing, Strange carves out a space where he can be truly himself. The result is quite simply one of the most versatile and compelling debuts in recent memory, and one that – as its title aptly suggests – is bound to leave a lasting impact well into the future.
It’s hard to overstate just how much variety there is on this album, and how skilfully Strange manages to pull it all off. ‘Jealousy’ is a spacey, meditative opener in which Strange’s performance atop the cathartic “Cut out my anger” mantra recalls the vocal dexterity of Moses Sumney before bursting right into the driving alt-rock of the lead single, ‘Mustang’. That track packs the same dizzying energy as its follow-up, ‘Boomer’, a startling bricolage of sounds that’s once again anchored by Strange’s dynamic vocal presence – he sounds just as comfortable rapping as he does screaming his heart out. “Sometimes, it’s hard to tell exactly where I wanna go/ I know it don’t show,” he sings on the pre-chorus, and he’s right – it doesn’t.
And yet, as confident as Live Forever sounds, what renders it so emotionally potent is the fact that Strange allows himself to be vulnerable. So many “genre-defying” records fail to augment their own inventiveness with any substance or heart, but the writing on this album is deeply rooted in Strange’s personal upbringing and the insecurities that haunt him to this day. ‘Mustang’ reflects on his experiences growing up in a rural, mostly white town in Oklahoma and the ways it made him feel unseen and unworthy; ‘Mossblerd’, which he says is a combination of “Mossberg (shotgun) and black nerd (blerd)”, highlights how the limitations of genre are tied to systemic racism. The whole album is peppered with references to feeling like a ghost and wanting (not) to be seen, a thematic through line that makes this shapeshifting LP feel like more of a holistic experience.
It also helps that the album is both ingeniously sequenced and tastefully produced from front to back. Remarkably, not a single track here sticks out like a sore thumb – clocking in at just 35 minutes, Live Forever achieves the rare feat of being ambitious without feeling bloated or painfully self-indulgent. In fact, if there’s one flaw to the album, it’s that it leaves you wanting more – a couple more tracks wouldn’t hurt, at least. But just when you think the album must be drying up of ideas, Strange keeps coming up with more: ‘Kelly Rowland’ slides into a hazy, intoxicating hip-hop rhythm, while the horns on the cinematic ‘In a Cab’ are reminiscent of Radiohead’s Kid A and ‘Flagey God’ traverses the same nocturnal electronic spaces of Burial’s Untrue. So when Strange delivers that “genres keep us in our boxes” line – against an industrial hip-hop backdrop, no less – he’s surely proved his point.
And yet! Turns out Bartees Strange has a few more tricks up his sleeve – ‘Far’ starts out as a spare acoustic ballad before erupting into a climactic whirlwind of electric guitars, while ‘Fallen for You’ remains an intimate, heartrending singer-songwriter affair throughout its runtime. The record ends with ‘Ghostly’, a song that swaddles you in its dreamy, Blonde-esque textures before Strange picks things up in the second part in an attempt to rise above that foggy mindscape. “But each morning morning I don’t feel worth it/ Pull up to my job almost on time/ Wish I could disappear more often/ Just run home and hide,” he sings. It’s a bleak sentiment, but the music implies the opposite of what’s being said: Bartees Strange has found his voice, and he’s not afraid to use it whichever way he wants. Ultimately, he rests on showing us there’s strength in vulnerability; a cliché, for sure, but just like genre, Strange deploys it in a way that’s genuinely exciting and almost unrecognizable.
The music industry has never been an easy place to make your fortune. Heck, many of the independent and “up and coming” bands that you listen to probably have day jobs. And in the current climate, it’s harder than ever for independent musicians. Every time you plug in your amp you face the same string of anxieties. Maybe you’re not commercial enough. Maybe you’re getting too old. Maybe you just don’t want it enough. Maybe the tides of public taste are pulling in the opposite direction to you. Maybe your dreams of rock stardom should be buried in the attic with your guitar strap and lucky plectrum… Or maybe you owe it to yourself to identify the reasons why your band isn’t getting taken as seriously as it should and take effective action.
In an age where there are more opportunities and fewer gatekeepers, many feel that the changing nature of the music industry actually makes it harder for promising artists to get discovered. But here are some of the reasons why you may not be taken as seriously as you deserve… and what you should do about it.
You care more about “making it” than being great
You’ve been doing this since your teens. And while many of your peers grew up and got “proper jobs”, you never abandoned your dreams of rock stardom. You’ve become an expert at trying to market your band’s brand, reaching out to t-shirt printing companies to create merch and trying to bill yourself to music bloggers as the next big thing.
And while all this is important, it shouldn’t supercede putting in the hours with the band and making sure you sound awesome.
Your demo screams “amateur”
Your demo is your calling card to the industry at large… Just make sure it’s saying all the right things about you. While you certainly don’t want it to sound over-produced (A&R professionals may assume that you’re over-compensating for a lack of raw talent) you don’t want it to scream “amateur hour” either. While there are many guides to recording your own demo out there, there’s no substitute to the expertise of a real Recording Studio. While we’re all feeling the pinch financially at the moment, investing in a professional sounding demo is an expenditure that you should absolutely consider.
So does your EPK… if you have one
If you want to get the music press on your side, you need a helpful, useful and attention-grabbing Electronic Press Kit (EPK). Keep in mind that music journalists see dozens of these every single day. And if they see one that’s riddled with typos, poorly formatted and lacking in the essential information that they need to do their jobs, they’re unlikely to give it a second glance.
You can play… but you can’t pitch
Finally, if you expect to be able to make it in the music business, you need to look at it as a business. And that means learning certain business skills… like the elevator pitch. You need to be able to engage A&Rs and music journos and bloggers with a succinct and easy to understand pitch. Like “We’re Slade meets Kasabian”… whatever the heck that might sound like.
The Kills have announced a new rarities album called Little Bastards, out December 11 via Domino. The collection will include B-sides as well as demos the band recorded from 2002 through to 2009. They’ve also released the video for a previously unreleased demo titled ‘Raise Me’, which the group’s Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince made around the time of their 2008 LP Midnight Boom. Check it out below.
The title of the album is named after the nickname for the drum machine the band was using at the time. “It was a Roland 880,” Hince said, “which isn’t strictly a drum machine – it’s a sequencer, and an eight-track recorder, with its own drum machine built in, and that’s what we’d record all our beats on.”
The Kills’ most recent studio album was 2016’s Ash & Ice. Mosshart recently released her debut solo spoken word LP, Sound Wheel.
Phoebe Bridgers has launched her own label, aptly titled Saddest Factory. The singer-songwriter will run it in partnernship with her current label Dead Oceans. “The vision of the label is simple: good songs, regardless of genre,” she said in a press release.
In an interview with Billboard, Bridgers revealed that she has already signed her first act, which will be announced in the next few weeks. “It’s always been a dream of mine to have a label, because I’m also such a music fan,” she explained. “One of my favorite things about this time is that everybody is listening to records faster, making tons of playlists and doing dance parties in their houses. I felt like if there’s cool stuff, I want to get it going and get it out to people as fast as possible.”
She also said the label is an opportunity for her to try something new within the music ecosystem. “I haven’t felt this yet, but maybe at some point I’ll want to take a step back from the every two years album cycle and want to do other shit, like produce or just put out records,” she said. “Music is always going to be in the forefront of my brain. I just want to explore.”
Jay Electronica has officially unveiled his long-awaited lost album Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn). The project has been made available via TIDAL after a leak began circulating online. Notably, the tracklist has remained almost the same since 2012, with credits that include Charlotte Gainsbourg, Serge Gainsbourg (sampled on ‘Bonnie and Clyde’), JAY-Z, and The-Dream. Listen to it below.
Act II: Patents Of Nobility follows the release of Electronica’s debut studio LP A Written Testimony, which came out back in March via Roc Nation. It featured multiple verses from Jay-Z as well as contributions from Travis Scott, The-Dream, James Blake, and James Fauntleroy. His debut mixtape, Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), dropped in July of 2007.
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this segment.
This week brought us a couple of great dance pop tunes, but they didn’t necessarily come from artists one might have expected: The xx’s Romy made her debut as a solo artist with the colourful, exuberant ‘Lifetime’, while Sigur Rós’ Jónsi teamed up with Swedish pop icon Robyn for a slightly more abrasive but equally rapturous listening experience. Going further down the experimental pop rabbit hole, Jimmy Edgar’s new collaborative single with SOPHIE is a short but hard-hitting instrumental banger. For something a bit more heartfelt and introspective, we turn to Gorillaz, who enlisted Elton John and 6LACK for another great addition to the Song Machine catalogue. In the world of indie, beabadoobee’s latest is a nostalgic lo-fi acoustic ballad that recalls her earlier work, while Kynsy served up a dark, dizzying slice of alt-rock with her second single.
Last month, TikTok user Nathan Apodaca blew up after sharing a video of him skating around and lip syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 hit ‘Dreams’ while clutching a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice. Now, Mick Fleetwood has joined TikTok just to recreate the viral video with the caption “Dreams and Cranberry just hits different.”. Watch both versions below.
Fleetwood Mac saw their streaming numbers double after the viral TikTok, springing from a daily average of 49,000 times a day to 105,000. There was a 242% increase in first-time listeners of the song, while sales of the track increased by 184% in the first three days of the original video being shared. Apocada’s video currently sits at over 21 million views.
In this series, we take a deep dive into a significant song from the past and get to the heart of what makes it so great. Today, we revisit the opening track of Radiohead’s 2000 masterwork, a startling document of mental disarray and a crucial turning point for a band on the verge of a breakdown.
Everything was not in its right place – that much was obvious. Following the international success and widespread critical acclaim of their landmark 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead were emotionally fatigued as a result of extensive touring and wholly disillusioned with rock n’ roll and the culture surrounding it. Thom Yorke had suffered a near-breakdown – multiple breakdowns, actually. “When I was a kid, I always assumed that [fame] was going to answer something – fill a gap,” he admitted much later. “And it does the absolute opposite. It happens with everybody. I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn’t deal with it for ages.”
He ended up buying a house in Cornwall, scribbling away at his sketchbook, day in and day out. He didn’t have a guitar with him – the thought of even picking one up mortified him. “I was allowed to play the piano and that was it, because that was all we had in the house,” he continued. “I did that for a few months and I started to tune back into why I’d started doing it… I remember having nothing in the house, except a Yamaha grand piano. Classic. And the first thing I wrote was ‘Everything in Its Right Place’.”
It’s almost impossible to imagine what that version sounded like – there are coverson YouTube, but even when Yorke performed the track on BBC Radio 1’s Piano Sessions in 2018, he refrained from taking the obvious route of playing it on a grand piano. Acoustic live performances of the track do exist, and they’re great, but only because you can hear the warped echo of the studio version in your head. Suffice to say, producer Nigel Godrich was not impressed with Yorke’s piano rendition of the song. Radiohead worked on it together in Copenhagen and Paris in a conventional band arrangement for a while, but to no avail. One night, Yorke and Godrich decided to transfer the song to a Prophet-5 synthesiser, a popular analog instrument that was widely used in horror movie soundtracks in the 80s and was also featured on songs by superstars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.
Notably, it was also used by one of the band’s formative influences, Talking Heads, whose 1980 album Remain in Light was a massive reference point for Kid A. But at the time, Yorke was immersing himself in an entirely different genre of music, listening almost exclusively to Warp artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. What resonated with him about the music, he explained in an interview with The Guardian, was that it was “all structures and had no human voices in it.” Though Yorke’s voice does appear on ‘Everything in its Right Place’, it’s heavily manipulated, chopped up, and distorted to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. His intention for the whole album was for his voice to serve the same purpose as any other instrument rather than being placed at the forefront – and nowhere is this artistic choice more evident than on the album’s opener, where it’s subtly suffused into the song’s muffled textures and glitchy electronics.
As if Radiohead weren’t already subject to immense external pressures, tensions started rising within the group, too. This wasn’t something new for the band, but so much of the media narrative surrounding Kid A revolved around how creative differences nearly broke them up – which makes sense, considering this was a group with three guitarists who had just started working on an album that was shaping up to be mostly electronic. Yorke was not shy about how heated things had gotten, but refused to spill out any details. In retrospect, though, that part of the story seems trivial compared to what they managed to achieve in spite of those differences. There were fears that Yorke might quit the band to pursue a solo career; twenty years later, all but one member of the band (Colin Greenwood) have embarked on their own solo endeavours, yet Radiohead remains just as big of an institution.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Whatever expectations fans had set up for Kid A, ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ was undeniably a startling introduction to the album. Reactions from both fans and critics were mixed. Naming the track as one of the best of the decade, Pitchfork’s Grayson Currin put it like this: “Sure, Thom Yorke had struggled with fandom and fame touring behind the monumental OK Computer, but what was this shit?” Forget about everything being in its right place – where was everything? This was minimal bordering on ambient, and whatever subtle flourishes crept into the mix seemed randomly assembled rather than carefully calculated. And what had happened to Thom Yorke’s voice? What the hell was he saying? Of course, the guy previously sang about “the unborn chicken voices in [his] head,” but this was approaching new levels of weirdness (“Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”), and, worse, abstraction (“There are two colours in my head”). A lot of people, including Nigel Godrich, thought he must have lost his marbles.
I’m too young to remember any of this, but the response to Kid A is almost as an integral part of its narrative as the story behind its creation. And then there was the discourse – that, for better or for worse, I have not been able to evade. In fact, Brice Ezell makes the compelling case that too much of the acclaim the album got was centered around narrative; simply put, “Kid A is more fun to think and write about than it is to actually listen to.” This is partly because it marked a turning point in Radiohead’s career, but also because of its symbolic significance in the wider socio-political context of its time and beyond. It described the feelings of alienation, technoparanoia, and eco-anxiety that would become prevalent in the new millennium, while also protesting against the threats of globalization and authoritarianism in a way that only feels more prescient now.
Like OK Computer, Kid A felt less like a nightmarish dystopia of the future than a chilling evocation of the present. But by the time of the album’s release, many of the fears the band had laid down with regards to technology had begun to materialize, and ironically, it was the internet that played a crucial role in breaking away from the traditional promotion cycle they desperately wanted to avoid. Growing increasingly resentful of the press, Radiohead and their label, Capitol, used an innovative marketing campaign that involved sending out “iBlips” that could be embedded in both online publications and fan sites and allowed users to preorder and stream the album. Three weeks before its release, however, Kid A was leaked online and distributed via Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network; Yorke, who later described Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”, was less critical of Napster, saying it “encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do.”
In his new book about Kid A, rock critic Steven Hyden delves into the ways in which the internet “fostered the widespread communication breakdown that Kid A signalled”. In other words, the album was experienced largely online, dissected first by fans in message boards and then by online reviews like the infamously overwritten 10.0 Pitchfork piece that helped popularize the site. But, to return to Ezell’s point, when part of what defines the album goes beyond the music, how much of that enthusiasm is actually about it?
Here’s the thing: all of that discourse was as alien to me going into Kid A as those jittery sounds were to most fans. Knowing little about the history of the band, I was simply looking for more music to enjoy from the band – and as soon as that arpeggio on ‘Everything In its Right Place’ trickled in, I was mesmerized. I can’t weigh in on whether those first five notes were the sound of Radiohead welcoming you to the new millennium or whatever, but I will say they made everything that followed on the album sound a lot more welcoming. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, to me, felt less like a radical departure than a natural continuation of what I already loved about the band’s music, but presented in an entirely different yet fascinating package. Everything truly felt in its right place, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. Like Thom Yorke, though, I felt “just as emotional about it as I’d ever felt about guitar music.”
It’s not like no one had done this before; Yorke’s inspirations, from krautrock to ambient music, were clear, and Radiohead were far from the first rock band to embrace left-field electronics. But if there’s a reason it worked for them better than it had for others, it was because some essence of the band didn’t just remain but was also amplified as a result of that experimentation. Besides, what the band was doing simply wasn’t that far off from what was already familiar to most people. The minimalist composer Steve Reich, who reinterpreted the track for his 2014 album Radio Rewrite, explained it like this: “Well, it’s three-chord rock but it’s not, it’s very unusual. It was originally in F minor, and it never comes down to the one chord, the F minor chord is never stated. So there’s never a tonic, there’s never a cadence in the normal sense, whereas in most pop tunes it will appear, even if it’s only in passing.”
At the risk of sounding pretentious, something about Reich’s observation made me think of the concept of the uncanny valley – the structures almost resemble pop, but they’re not. There’s certainly something uncanny about the track as a whole, from its dreamlike, haunting qualities to the way Yorke’s voice oscillates between being robotic and profoundly human. Ten years ago, Timothy Gabriele wrote an article entitled ‘The Degeneration of the Voice in Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’’ about how the manipulation of Yorke’s voice was a means through which he could dissociate from the mythology surrounding his image, as well as the middle-class miserablism it had come to represent. “I couldn’t stand the sound of me,” he told The Wire in 2001. It could also be, Gabriele argued, a reflection of the loss of self that occurs in late capitalism; like Yorke, people had lost control of their own voice, disembodied from their own narrative and place in society.
Listening to ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, though, also feels like sifting through Thom Yorke’s disorienting mental state. Though he refused to identify the lyrics and instructed fans not to pay attention to them, he was also opposed to the idea that it was all gibberish. As vague as they are, they also elicit an intensely specific mood: in an interview with Rolling Stone, Yorke said the song was partly based on a moment of paralysis following a 1997 concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham. “I came off at the end of that show, sat in the dressing room and couldn’t speak,” he remembered. “I actually couldn’t speak. People were saying, ‘You all right?’ I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear them. And I couldn’t talk. I’d just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I’d had enough. I was beyond that.”
The song doesn’t just describe that experience; it recreates it. “What, what is that you tried to say?” he repeats over and over, his voice enveloped by distorted echoes that threaten to overtake him. Even when consumed by its own fragments, though, Yorke’s real voice still remains at the center of the song’s orbit. Unlike ‘Fitter Happier’ from OK Computer, which used a synthesized voice to underscore the absurdity of its own idealist manisfesto, ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ centers on a distinctly human voice striving for normality – not perfection – amidst all the chaos.
Rather than moving further towards a point of resolution, however, the song, and the album as a whole, only descends further into paranoia. It sounds more like being stuck in a circle, which is fitting, considering that Yorke was experiencing writer’s block at the time. “I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things,” he explained. In the song, however, moving forward feels like an active struggle – which may have something to do with Reich’s observation that the song never comes down to the one chord, giving off the impression of being trapped in a loop of hopelessness and isolation.
As bleak and ominous as ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ sounds, it never succumbs to that complete loss of identity, and neither does it negate the possibility of finding peace. Even as it distorts its own sense of tranquility, there’s still something deeply cathartic about it. Yorke’s voice might have sounded nothing like what people associated it with, but instead of making him disappear, this new approach allowed him to look further inwards, revealing even more complexities not just about his own personal state but also that of the world around him. It became the defining statement of the album, so much so that it seems impossible to imagine Kid A’s existence without it – which isn’t necessarily the case for all its tracks, as ingenious as they may be. In fact, it’s hard to contextualize the rest of Radiohead’s entire catalogue without this song. You don’t have to see it as part of a narrative for its brilliance to shine through, but placing it in a broader context does make things seem a bit less depressing. Kid A is a document of anxious disarray, but ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ opened the door for the band to reinvent themselves and find new ways to communicate their distress. As it turned out, everything didn’t have to be in its right place in order to feel right.
