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, Billie Eilish returned with a chillingly evocative new single, ‘my future’the sheet music for which is now also available; blink-182’s Travis Barker linked up with Run the Jewels for a hard-hitting collab, following from their previous joint track ‘All Due Respect’ from RTJ2; London artist and Paul Institute co-founder A. K. Paul shared his third single, the groovy ‘Be Honest’, with the promise of new music soon; Angel Olsen unveiled a stunning, stripped-back song, ‘Whole New Mess’, the first teaser from her upcoming album; Touché Amore gave us the first taste from their first album in four years with the emotive ‘Limelight’; and Matilda Mann came through with an intimate, heartfelt ballad titled ‘Robbed’.
VELUX are back with their beloved rewards for the months of August, September, and October. If you haven’t heard of the VELUX Rewards before, here is a short breakdown. VELUX are offering £50 rewards on VELUX white-painted top-hung roof windows and £30 rewards on all other VELUX white-painted roof windows purchased this August, September and October. £30 offer excludes VELUX white-painted burglary-resistant roof windows (GGL 70Q). All rewards must be claimed by the 13th of November, 2020.
Where can you spend VELUX rewards?
VELUX rewards can be spent in Argos, Currys PC World, Costa, Tesco, M&S, John Lewis, TK Maxx, Adidas and H&M.
How do I claim my VELUX reward?
To claim, you need to sign up at velux.co.uk/rewards and upload an image of their invoice.
Where can I buy VELUX windows from?
VELUX windows can be bought online our store, we will provide options needed for any size and glazing you may need.
Socks can be an essential part of your outfit, especially if they stand out from your outfit. When it comes to suits, we love to wear plain black or grey socks, but sometimes it can be fun to mix it up with some funky patterned socks or socks that remind us of something we love. With this ever-growing trend of business people wearing funky socks reaching new heights, we have made a list of 5 eye-pleasing socks you can wear with a suit.
Polka Dot Socks, Reiss
Polka dot socks can be a great way to bring more life to your outfit. They can be matched with a polka dot square pocket — if you fancy. Polka dot socks do come in various colours, most popular are navy and black, but can also look great reversed with the dominant colour being white and dots being in blue/black.
These socks won’t make you look crazy but will bring a flow of colour to your look that will adapt nicely with your overall outfit. In terms of combinations, you can mix this with a classic navy suit for more blend, or go with a lighter suit to bring a more dynamic look.
We cannot forget our best friends — dogs. With these superbly designed socks, Barbour keeps us closer to our pets than ever before. It’s quirky, and we love it.
This stylish pair of socks is brought to us by Ted Baker, a respected British clothing company known for some superb designs over the years. These socks utilise a quirky and beautiful design that incorporates dragonflies, making it a bookmarked product for the shopping list.
With the summer weather being present, sometimes it’s nice to think of refreshing fruit when you’re on a business call. These watermelon socks will help you do that; in fact, they will make you stand out from the crowd.
Phoebe Bridgers and Courtney Barnett joined forces for a cover of Gillian Welch’s 2001 song ‘Everything Is Free’. The performance was part of Newport Folk Festival’s virtual event, which took place over the weekend. The historic festival, which started in Rhode Island in 1959, was cancelled back in April due to the coronavirus pandemic. Bridgers and Barnett tuned in from their homes in Los Angeles and Melbourne respectively. Check out a clip of their performance below.
Both artists have covered ‘Everything Is Free’ before; as Stereogum notes, Bridgers performed the song at the very same festival in 2018. Released as part of Welch’s 2001 album Time (The Revelator), the track was originally written about the arrival of Napster and the effects it would have on musicians, but takes on a new resonance today following Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s controversial comments about the streaming platform’s business model.
Last week, Bridgers unveiled the video for ‘I Know the End’, the apocalyptic closing track from her most recent album Punisher. Barnett is currently working on the soundtrack for the upcoming documentaryBrazen Hussies, about the Australian Women’s Liberation Movement.
Taylor Swift‘s folklorehas debuted at the number one spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart, making it the biggest debut for an album since her last album, Lover, came out a year ago. It’s also the bigggest debut of the year, taking the place of Juice WRLD’s posthumous album Legends Never Die.
The album sold over 846,000 equivalent album units in the first week since its release on July 24. According to Billboard, those album units consist of 615,000 album sales, 218,000 streaming equivalent albums (racking up a total of 289.85 million streams), and 13,000 track equivalent albums. Swift’s eighth studio album is her seventh to debut at the top of the Billboard chart, breaking the record for the most No. 1 debuts among women (Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Britney Spears all hold 6, while Jay-Z holds the record for most No. 1 debuts with 14). It also marks the first time an artist has had seven different albums sell at least half a million copies in one week (Swift was previously tied with Eminem).
Folklore is this year’s best-selling album, replacing BTS’ Map of the Soul: 7, which has a total of 574,000 sales since it was released in February. It’s also had the largest streaming week of the year for an album by a woman with a total of 289.85 million on-demand streams. It’s worth noting that Swift achieved this without a traditional album roll-out, announcing the album a day before its release, and despite the fact that the album finds her straying away from her pop-friendly sound to a more indie aesthetic. Read our review of the album here.
The Martian is a 2016 film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels, and others. The film is based on Andy Weir’s 2011 novel of the same name.
Damon portrays Mark Watney, a botanist who ends up stranded on Mars while his crew, believing he’s dead after an accident in a storm, is heading back to Earth. Watney must figure out how to survive on Mars long enough to wait for the next mission to bring him back home. Little does he know that millions of people on Earth are rooting for him, and NASA is working tirelessly to organize a rescue mission while Watney’s crew devises a daring mission of their own.
Here are fifteen brilliant stills from The Martian.
Tom Leighton, a superb photographer out of London, U.K, has presented an excellent series in which he explores and brings the beautiful, eye-pleasing architecture of the modern London to its minimalist features.
When Logic announced his retirement, it was hard not to be at least a little bit sceptical – rappers make these sort of statements all the time only to make a grand comeback just a few years later. But the Maryland rapper sounded both serious and determined: having recently become a dad, he wanted to focus on spending time with his family. Of course, he also struck a seven-figure deal with streaming platform Twitch, where he will be streaming a set amount of hours per week. “I’m not this rapper guy, man,” he said in an interview. “I’m just a nerd. I love video games.”
For anyone who’s been following Logic’s trajectory, this statement doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Though most would rather forget it, it was only last year that he put out an entire album of alternative rock songs that were both painfully derivative and completely forgettable. Its follow-up, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, was another stylistic pivot that didn’t quite pan out. But there’s no denying that Logic – aka Sir Robert Bryson Hall II – loves rap; he proves as much on this album, titled No Pressure and billed as a spiritual successor to his great full-length debut Under Pressure, which is filled to the brim with well-placed nods and tributes to a number of hip-hop artists. Even as far back as 2014, when that album was released, he found himself wrestling with the same kinds of questions: “Do you really wanna be famous?/ Do you really wanna be a superstar?” he asked himself on ‘Buried Alive’.
The way Logic conflates the rap game with rap as an art-form on No Pressure can be seen as somewhat odd; worse still is the veiled implication that there’s no space in hip-hop for fathers or for nerds who love video games. But it doesn’t take much digging to realize these criticisms don’t really hold ground, as Logic convincingly unpacks the effects fame has had on his mental health. Sure, you can’t help but roll your eyes a little when he delivers platitudes like “money don’t complete us” or “money ain’t the key to happiness” considering how much of it he’ll still be making, but when he centers his focus less on the entertainment industry as a whole than on his own mental state, his tone is unmistakably sincere. “Been addicted to money, been addicted to fame/ Addicted to arenas and people screamin’ my name/ But it’s time to let go, it’s time to make a change,” he raps on the hard-hitting ‘Hit My Line’.
But perhaps the most poignant aspect of Logic’s self-reflective lyrics is the way they reveal how fame has affected his creative process: “Nowadays it’s hard to get in the zone/ Writin’ rhymes was easy before the fame/ Now I’m constantly overthinkin’ every line, it’s a shame/ Rap used to fill me with joy, now it’s nothin’ but pain,” he admits on ‘Dark Place’. He sounds genuinely broken, and at this point, you can no longer doubt he’s made the right decision. And yet it’s hard not to point out that despite those insecurities, his flows haven’t been this consistently good in years; same goes for the album’s songwriting and vibrant production. Aided by legendary producer and previous collaborator No I.D., the songs here are infused with the kind of old-school, boom-bap influenced sound that makes them stand out more than any of his trap-inflected efforts.
While the production on No Pressure is far from original, it manages to execute these sounds so well and with such an infectious appreciation for the genre that it doesn’t really matter. Thalia, a fictional character/ computer program dating back to Logic’s The Incredible True Story, makes a return here, and while her references to influences such as Kanye West and MF Doom are pretty redundant at this point, the way Logic tips his hat to other rappers throughout is part of what makes the album so entertaining; from his nod to Erykah Badu on ‘GP4’ to his interpolation of Outkast’s ‘Elevators (Me & You)’ on the very same track or Kanye West’s ‘Heard Them Say’ later in the tracklisting, making for some of its most memorable highlights.
Clocking in at nearly an hour, No Pressure is probably going to be too long for most listeners, but the abundance of Easter Eggs and callbacks to his earlier work renders it the perfect yet bittersweet goodbye for longtime fans. There’s not much of a concept tying things together here, either, but this is also one of the album’s charms; Logic treads through a wide range of topics, his demeanour laid-back and relaxed. The title’s no coincidence – with a lot of that weight off his chest, he sounds comfortable doing just what he does best. “I remember makin’ music alone, just a pen and a microphone,” he reminisces on ‘Dark Place’. If Logic does ever make a comeback, one can only hope that his approach is as back-to-basics as this album, and as untroubled by what the world thinks of him. If it’s half as fun as him rapping about making sure his son eats his greens on ‘DadBod’, it’ll be well worth the suspense. No pressure, though.
Earlier this week, Lana Del Rey released her new spoken word album Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. Featuring music from producer Jack Antonoff, it serves as the audiobook version of her poetry collection of the same name, which is available for purchase through Google Play and Audible. She previously shared sample track from the album (which is not available on streaming services), and has now posted a vintage-looking, low-quality video of her reciting the poem ‘Salamander’ in her backyard, filmed by her brother Charlie Grant. Check it out below.
“I love you, but you don’t understand me, I’m a real poet!” the poem goes. “My life is my poetry, my love making is my legacy!/ My thoughts are about nothing, and beautiful, and for free.”
First announced back in December, the album is one of two spoken word poetry projects the singer is planning to release this year, the second of which is titled behind the iron gates – insights from an institution and has no release date as of yet. del Rey reportedly also has another LP in store, titled White Hot Forever and scheduled for release on September 5th.
Lil Uzi Vert and Future have shared a pair of new singles, ‘Over Your Head’ and ‘Patek’ (not to be confused with Uzi’s 2018 song ‘New Patek’). Listen to both songs below.
The two rappers first teased their latest collaboration on July 21 by posting a video directed by Hype Williams on social media – 10 days later, it was looking like the new songs might not actually drop, but the pair finally came through, releasing both tracks under the title Pluto X Baby Pluto.
The pair’s last collaboration was ‘All Bad’, a cut from Future’s latest album High Off Life, following ‘Wassup’ from the deluxe edition of Uzi’s Eternal Atake called LUV vs. The World 2. Both rappers have dropped new albums in 2020: Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake was released in March, while Future’s High Off Life dropped in May.