NewJeans have dropped a new song, ‘Right Now’, the B-side to their upcoming single ‘Supernatural’, which comes out Friday. It’s the South Korean girl group’s first Japanese song, and it arrives with a video produced by Min Hee-jin, directed by Youngeum Lee, and made in collaboration with the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. Watch and listen below.
Earlier this year, NewJeans released the songs ‘Bubble Gum’ and ‘How Sweet’.
In the vibrant creative atmosphere of central London shines a dazzling new star—Xiafei Leah Li. As an artist, her name has begun to make waves in the capital’s art scene. Leveraging her solid photography skills, superb painting abilities and a delicate approach to her works, Xiafei Li has brought an unprecedented burst of colour to London’s artistic landscape.
Let’s delve into Xiafei Li’s world together and witness how she creates captivating art in this city full of creativity.
With a sharp eye for capturing fleeting moments that often escape notice and bold contrast of subjects chosen, Xiafei Li’s works are impressive not only in terms of her technical prowess but also in her deliberate and delicate artistic expression and narrative depth. The decisive choice of subjects, colours, and subtle play of shades of colours invites the audience into a wonder world of nature, human and civilisation in the artist’s eye.
Xiafei Li captivates viewers with her manipulation of colours and lighting. With purposeful contrasts used in lights and shades, seen in her works, she tells her story through moments captured in nature, of humans and streets of the UK. The stories told in her still images are artistic, aesthetically pleasing,and inviting, they are to be enjoyed and contemplated with.
In her works titled ‘Purple’, she captures shades of pink and purple, colours not common in natural settings, and complement them with the delicate hues familiar to the British southern coastline. The depth and richness of her palettes are a testament to her skills and vision, the different gradients inviting exploration and contemplation. Her meticulous attention to detail and understanding of the interplay between hues and shadows greatly elevate her works.
Another feature of Li’s artistry is her use of contrasting subjects and juxtaposition. Within her works, the serenity of natural landscapes with the dynamic energy of urban environments create a unique visual dialogue that is not found in conventional perspectives. This interplay of clam and chaos, nature and civilization, introduces a sense of tension and harmony that highlights the disparity between the elements in our world. The use of contrasting subjects and lights and shadows add depth and intensity to her work.
The value of Xiafei’s works also lies in the interaction and reflection of the audience. Xiafei stimulates the audience’s imagination and thinking, prompting them to delve deeper into the emotional narrative behind the works. This interaction and reflection not only enrich the audience’s artistic experience but also stimulate reflections on themes such as femininity and humanity. Her bold play on colours and dramatic lighting adds intensity to pictures. Strong contrasts often evoke a sense of drama, but is balanced off by the soothing colour palette of the picture. Audiences can see themes of exploration of richer and deeper cultural experiences in Xiafei Li’s creations. She does not shy away from themes of femininity and sometimes sexuality; through deeper emotional expression and thematic exploration, her works leave a profound and lasting impression on the audience.
In terms of photography techniques, Xiafei Li’s works are full of professional techniques and exquisite skills. She demonstrates a deep understanding and precise grasp of photographic art while excels in using various photography techniques and professional equipment to capture subtle details and emotional expressions in images. She skillfully employs changes in lighting and shadows, lens focal lengths, and composition layouts to imbue each frame with vivid atmosphere and emotional appeal. Through these editing skills and fine art techniques collected over the years, she vividly presents different narratives to the audience, immersing and guiding them along her creative journey.
Compared to some other artistic photographers, Xiafei Li exhibits a unique artistic style. Her works draw elements of practicality from commercial photography to complement the creativity of artistic photography, presented in a novel and attention-grabbing, thought-invoking manner. Compared to traditional artistic photography, her works prioritise storytelling and emotional expression, making them more relatable to the audience’s life and emotional experiences. Through careful conceptualization and meticulous refinement, Xiafei Li injects each project with a unique visual language and emotional resonance, offering the audience a series of audiovisual feasts.
Xiafei Li has injected new vitality into London’s creative scene with her outstanding talent and rich experience, and is emerging as one of the leaders driving industry development. With each click of her camera, her artistic journey is sure to shine even brighter, painting a narrative infused with new depts of experiences and evolution. Anticipation hangs in the air as we await the unveiling of Xiafei Li’s forthcoming creations and exhibitions in the London art photography community.
With his daring minimalism, Kentucky-based artist Jeremy Booth captures the essence of the Wild West. Based on iconic cowboys and Western landscapes, his work embodies the spirit of resilience and adventure inherent in the Wild West while maintaining a contemporary aesthetic. To talk about his art and transition from commercial to fine art, he joined us for an interview.
The primary reason for my transition was my desire to create artwork for myself rather than for companies. This desire has grown over the years and two years ago, I made the decision to take the leap. Initially, I experimented with different subject matters to find what felt right. With my love for the West and increasing interest in Western art due to shows like Yellowstone and artists like Mark Maggiori, I decided to give Western art a chance. What I initially thought would be a temporary series turned into an obsession, and I chose to focus solely on Western art.
I started as a digital artist, but a little over a year ago, I began painting my Western works. Since that decision, my creative process has changed drastically, as has the outcome. I have had to learn things like patience, expand my color theory knowledge by physically mixing paint, and control my breath when painting hard lines.
As a result of this new process, I feel more connected to my work than ever before. Painting by hand, smelling the paint, and sitting in the same room as my work has completely changed everything for me.
The reference material for my work starts with a photograph of a cowboy or landscape, taken by either myself or my wife. Every year, my wife Tabitha and I visit a ranch out West, where we spend a few days with cowboys and ranchers. It’s during this time that we capture their way of life through photography, which is essential to the cinematic quality of my work. The cinematic approach comes naturally in that setting as the landscape and the subject bring the work to life.
Once we return home, I sift through thousands of photographs to select images that I believe would make great compositions on a canvas. When I begin creating the image, I focus on removing intricate details and emphasize blocks of color to form the image. It’s like a dance – I aim to remove enough detail to make the piece feel complete without taking away too much.
Last year, we visited a horse ranch in Craig, Colorado. The vast land was home to hundreds of horses. This trip reminded me how simple life should be. All we really need are the essentials: the ones we love, food, and shelter. Spending time with the cowboys as they worked, ate, sang around the fire, and had many conversations reminded me of this truth. I find it interesting how the simplicity of that lifestyle parallels the style of my work. Simple.
I’m mostly inspired by being out West and among the cowboy community. But, I’d say Mark Maggiori and Ed Mell really grew my interest in Western art and the reason I’m doing it today.
I’d say I feel empowered most of the time. I have used AI to seek assistance in creating landscape reference material. AI-generated mountainscapes can be helpful when looking for reference material. I think it’s great when AI is a part of the process, such as when using Adobe Illustrator.
Be consistent, don’t be afraid of work, and try new things.
Torres and Fruit Bats have announced a joint EP, A Decoration, which arrives August 9 via their shared label home, Merge. Check out the new single ‘Married for Love’ below.
In a statement, Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson shared:
I’ve been a fan of the music of Torres for a long time, so when [Merge co-founder] Mac [McCaughan] suggested it to me, I jumped at the chance. The whole recording process wound up being done totally remotely with each of us on our respective coasts—it was like assembling a cross-continental jigsaw puzzle in the ether.
Mackenzie and I worked on this in a breezy way where all ideas and sounds were fair game. We each brought a few sketches into the initial ideas pile and treated them in a way like we were doing remixes of each other’s songs. There were no wrong answers. The back and forth continued until the music was in a totally different place from where it began.
Sometimes when you do collaborative projects, it ends up just sounding like an amalgam of the two artists. This process assured that the final EP kinda sounds like nothing either of us has ever done—it’s a collection of wishful love chants, patiently unfolding fuzzy loops, danceable ambience, and pleas to the universe.
Commenting on the first single, Torres said: “The recording we’re releasing is synthy, but the demo was darker and had no acoustic instruments on it. I sent it to him and he turned it into what he described as a Quaker chant. He made it softer and added these beautiful harmonies, something you could almost imagine hearing in a church as opposed to the nightclubby vibe I had going.”
Torres and Fruit Bats both released their latest albums last year: What an Enormous Room and A River Running to Your Heart, respectively.
A Decoration Cover Artwork:
A Decoration Tracklist:
1. A Decoration
2. Still Want More
3. The Fox
4. Married for Love
5. In the Old Style
6. Pink Triangle
The Japanese House, the project of Amber Bain, has returned with a new song titled ‘:)’. Bain produced the song herself alongside George Daniel of the 1975 and Chloe Kraemer. It arrives ahead of a run of dates supporting Maggie Rogers as well as her own North American headline tour. Listen to it below.
“‘Smiley Face’ is a song I wrote when I was very excited about talking to someone off a dating app,” Bain explained in a statement. “She lived in Detroit, and I was fantasising about flying to meet her. I was in a session at the time for someone else’s stuff, but I couldn’t help this song spilling out of me, I was in some sort of frenzy. Turns out I did buy the plane tickets, now we’re engaged.”
‘:)’ marks the Japanese House’s first release since last year’s In the End It Always Does.
“Break it all so we can build again,” Colin Meloy sings on ‘Joan in the Garden’, the closing track on the Decemberists’ new album, though taking the lyric out of context – it’s preceded by the typically archaic couplet “Oh holy whore androgyne/ Come and sunder the stop signs” – seems rather disingenuous. The last lines of the song also serve as the album’s title, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, which is a broad mantra that critics will take as a reference on the band’s anachronistic approach. It’s true that the Decemberists don’t exactly break new ground on their first release in six years – which is also the first on their own label YABB Records after nearly two decades with Capitol – but it feels less like a return to the band’s roots than a journey through their sizable discography, leaning into their proggier tendencies while focusing on concise yet lushly detailed songcraft. It easily registers as their best effort in at least a decade.
Well, easily, but maybe not so quickly – As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is the Decemberists’ longest-ever project, a double album split into four thematic parts. ‘Joan in the Garden’, which accompanied the record’s announcement, stretches over 19 minutes. Ambition has always been one of the band’s distinctive traits, so fans may find it oddly familiar, but what makes the record such an enjoyable listen is how invigorated Meloy and company sound. There’s a vibrant theatricality to these songs that the band usually reserves for their more conceptual offerings. ‘America Made Me’, the only song reflecting on what Meloy calls “Americanism in 2024” on a record that mostly foregoes the political underpinnings of 2018’s I’ll Be Your Girl, is jaunty yet fittingly charged by boisterous drums and subtle dissonance. Even when veering towards doom (of a more literary kind) on ‘Don’t Go to the Woods’, Meloy’s delivery is shot through with tender emotion, while opener ‘Burial Ground’ is upbeat in a way that makes its humour – “This world’s all wrong, so let’s go where we belong/ Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground” – sound a little less fatalistic.
What’s changed, clearly, isn’t the subject matter of the band’s songs but the tone they strike, which is less wearied and angry than in the recent past. Like the structure of the album, which sees them reuniting with Tucker Martine after the John Congleton-produced I’ll Be Your Girl, it’s tightly balanced. Along with ‘Burial Ground’, buoying the first quarter of the record is the salsa-leaning ‘Oh No!’ and the radiant ‘Long White Veil’, which shimmers with touches of pedal steel and Jenny Conlee’s backing vocals. As is so often the case in the Decemberists’ songs, the hooks aren’t predictable so much as harbingers of the inevitable, and ‘Long White Veil’ stands among their most memorable: “I married her, I carried her/ On the very same day I buried her.”
After the album’s opening run, the songs are just as tuneful though gradually more stripped-back, from the John Prine-inspired ‘William Fitzwilliam’ to the ‘The Black Maria’, which features a gorgeous brass section. There’s a sweetness the band seems to commit to, even when the music bows its head. But the biggest shift is a lyrical one, and it begins with ‘All I Want Is You’: “Don’t want stunning wordplay,” Meloy sings, freely undercutting the playfulness and verbosity of everything that’s come before to home in on the sincerity of its titular line. He doesn’t sound tired, exactly, just unpretentious and somewhat burdened by the weight of language, a sentiment that recurs in ‘Never Satisfied’. This retreat into a more direct, feelings-forward style makes the swirling, hallucinatory excess of ‘Joan in the Garden’ feel like not only a jarring finale, but a kind of resurrection. It swirls in intensity, disintegrates, then storms back to life, but what renders it unique in the Decemberists’ catalogue isn’t just its epic runtime, but how far they really diverge from their signature sound in that ambient middle section, which harbours the kind of wild inspiration that keeps a band pushing forward. There might only be that glimpse of it here, but the journey has been as rewarding as ever, so you’ll want to come back.
The Softies, the duo of Tiger Trap’s Rose Melberg and Pretty Face’s Jen Sbragia, have announced their first new album in 24 years. It’s called The Bed I Made, and it arrives August 23 via Father/Daughter. Check out the lead single ‘I Said What I Said’ below, along with the album’s cover art and tracklist.
“Over the course of our 30 year friendship there were bound to be experiences that would befall us both, sometimes at the same time, sometimes years apart,” the duo said in a press release. “‘I Said What I Said’ is a song that encapsulates a shared desire for escape, a push towards forward momentum and unapologetic self-forgiveness for not always being able to speak the truth.”
The Bed I Made Cover Artwork:
The Bed I Made Tracklist:
1. Go Back In Time
2. I Said What I Said
3. To You From Me
4. Tiny Flame
5. When I Started Loving You
6. Just Someone
7. California Highway 99
8. Dial Tone
9. The Bed I Made
10. 23rd Birthday
11. Sigh Sigh Sigh
12. Heaphones
13. Foot Path
14. Don’t Fall Apart
WHY? have previewed their upcoming album, The Well I Fell Into, with a new single called ‘G-dzillah G’dolah’. The track, which follows lead single ‘The Letters, Etc.’, is accompanied by a Scott Fredette-directed video. Watch and listen below.
“Here, we come to a moment of doubt about the doubt,” the band’s Yoni Wolf explained in a statement. “In an airplane, flying to meet his love after not seeing her for some time, our guy feels small and helpless at the prospect of the impending engagement. In her absence, he has reconstructed her into a towering monster within his affections; a G-dzillah G’dolah— the ultimate God shadow baddie. He assures her that when they see each other, they will ‘make it right,’ but it’s clear he’s only grasping at tatters of the past. He can feel it, she’s slipping away. He’s supremely intimidated and hates himself for losing her in the first place. The song is entirely spoken from thirty thousand feet up in anticipation of the meeting, so as listeners we are left without resolution or report after the fact.”
The Well I Fell Into arrives August 2 on WHY?’s own Waterlines label.
Jordana is back with a new single, ‘We Get By’. The track was produced by Emmett Kai and comes with an Otium-directed video, which you can check out below.
‘We Get By’ is about true love,” Jordana said in a statement. “It’s about leaving any materialistic things behind and basking in the appreciation of the truest loving from a pure ground zero — whether that be with yourself or with someone else. We could leave everything we have and still be happy.”
Jordana released her most recent album, Face the Wall, in 2022. She followed it up with the I’m Doing Well, Thanks for Asking EP later that year.
Crack Cloud have released a new song, ‘The Medium’, alongside an accompanying video. It’s taken from the Canadian art-punks’ upcoming LP Red Mile, which was led by the single ‘Blue Kite’. Check it out below.
Red Mile, the follow-up to 2022’s Tough Baby, is set to arrive on July 26 via Jagjaguwar.
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