Chastity Belt have put out a new single, ‘Chemtrails’, from their forthcoming album Live Laugh Love. The track comes with an accompanying video directed by Ertuğrul Yaka, which you can watch below.
“‘Chemtrails” started off as a jam when we were rehearsing for an upcoming tour,” the band’s Julia Shapiro explained in a statement. “I started playing that initial lead guitar part without thinking, and the rest came together pretty naturally after that. Gretchen’s drums along with Annie’s bass really drive the song – the drums remind me a bit of Protomartyr (love those boys!), and Lydia’s lead guitar line in the chorus is very rock n roll. The lyrics are about not being able to let go of things and retracing memories in your head. I reached out to Ertuğrul Yaka about animating something to the song because his work is often pretty dark and introspective, and he came up with a video that really fits the vibe.”
Live Laugh Love comes out March 29 via Suicide Squeeze Records. In addition to ‘Chemtrails’, it includes the early singles ‘I-90 Bridge’ and ‘Hollow’.
Shabaka Hutchings has announced his debut solo LP under the mononym Shabaka. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the follow-up to 2022’s Afrikan CultureEP, is due for release on April 12 via Impulse!. It finds Hutchings focusing primarily on flutes and softer woodwinds, with contributions from André 3000, Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, Brandee Younger, Floating Points, Laraaji, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Saul Williams, Elucid, and more. To accompany the announcement, Hutchings has shared a Phoebe Boswell-directed video for lead single ‘End of Innocence’, which you can check out below.
‘End of Innocence’, and the album more broadly, “really signifies a departure for me, a departure from the bands that I’ve become known for playing in, and the arrival of the flutes in general,” Hutchkings explained. “I bring a lot of flutes to the album and explore different kind of sonic terrains, although for this track in particular, it’s not actually the flute, it’s the clarinet. It’s my first instrument, the instrument that I consider to be my primary instrument, so it’s really going back to what I feel most comfortable with.”
Opening up about the collaborative process behind the LP, Hutchings shared: “I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. The musicians gathered at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary.”
Hutchings added: “Around the release of the Shabaka and the Ancestors album We Are Sent Here by History, I coined the term ‘sonic poems’ to express how I’m intending the listener to relate to the words associated with the sounds contained on the disc. Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.”
Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace Cover Artwork:
Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace Tracklist:
1. End of Innocence
2. As the Planets and the Stars Collapse
3. Insecurities
4. Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become
5. The Wounded Need to Be Replenished
6. Body to Inhabit
7. I’ll Do Whatever You Want
8. Living
9. Breathing
10. Kiss Me Before I Forget
11. Song of the Motherland
Keeley Forsyth has announced her third album and debut for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, The Hollow. It’s out on 10 May. To mark the announcement, Fosyth has shared a video for the lead single ‘Horse’, which you can check out below.
‘Horse’ was inspired by Bela Tarr’s final film, The Turin Horse, and Forsyth reached out to its composer Mihály Vig to ask for permission to “reimagine” his soundtrack score. “With this track, I roamed, capturing vocals in different spaces, forging a connection as I sang,” Forsyth explained in a statement. “I imagined battling against an invisible force, facing down challenges, pressing on, determined to breathe in this. I chose to refuse to be shackled by the chains of language here, surrendering instead to the primal dance of my body’s urges. My mouth moves in sync with the shallow breaths of my gut, and impulse guiding my every wordless utterance.”
The Hollow, which follows 2022’s Limbs, features guest appearances from Colin Stetson and Matthew Bourne. It was produced by Keeley and Ross Downes.
“We wanted to make something slightly more expansive, continuing to reference what we love from various genres without ever belong-ing to one,” Forsyth said of the record. “It’s with this ethos that we recognise aspects of sacred music, minimalist post-classical, dark ambient, film and theatre soundtracks. Forsyth layered her vocals into chamber choirs, applied pitch shifts and other digital processing, and speaks directly with clear articulate intention one moment to mumbled numb utterances in the next.”
The Hollow Cover Artwork:
The Hollow Tracklist:
1. Answer
2. The Hollow
3. Come And See
4. Eve
5. Turning [feat. Colin Stetson]
6. A Shift
7. Slush
8. Drag Me Down
9. Do I Breathe
10. In The Corner
11. Horse
12. Creature [feat. Matthew Bourne]
Kiran Leonard has announced a new album titled Real Home, sharing the song ‘My Love, Let’s Take the Stage Tonight’ along with the news. The LP is out April 17 via the London-based artist’s new label home, Memorials of Distinction. Check out the new song and find the album cover and tracklist below.
Leonard offered this context on the song:
My imitation of the great Hank Williams, in spirit if not in substance…This is one of the best efforts on Real Home at a song-as-object. Looking at it now I realise I was trying to write a song that made itself known as a song to the listener, and I wonder whether that’s crucial if you want a song to transcend its context. And that this is either accomplished through a total openness – by being inviting, by laying the tricks of the song out plain to see, as Williams and his many ghostwriters did so well – or by adopting a knowing aloofness, positioning oneself against the listener but letting it be known that that’s what it’s doing. In this song I try both, but mostly the former: as in, I wanted to write a song where every line follows on from the next.
Speaking about the album, he added: “The theme of the home obviously recurs throughout the record; the album was mostly recorded in domestic spaces with friends, and the name of the album is Real Home. I like the qualifier ‘real’, like you’re getting past the cloak of the word and towards the thing-itself…[also] nearly all the percussion in this record was recorded on items from my dad’s shed (jam jars, sandpaper, blocks of wood, etc). Real home record!”
Real Home Cover Artwork:
Real Home Tracklist:
1. Pass Between Houses
2. Theatre for Change
3. Real Home
4. Treat Me a Stranger
5. Utopia of Bog
6. Void Attentive
7. My Love, Let’s Take the Stage Tonight
8. The Kiss
9. He Had Always Led
Fred again.. has joined forces with Lil Yachty and Overmono for his latest single, ‘stayinit’. The accompanying video captures the moment Yachty heard the song out of a sound system for the first time; “I’m pretty sure that before this he might have only heard it thru his phone lol,” the producer writes in the description, “And this tune is obviously builtttt for rooms and sound like this.” Check it out below.
‘stayinit’ is the latest in a series of collabroations from Fred again.., following December’s Baby Keem-assisted ‘leavemealone’, ‘ten’ with Jozzy, and ‘adore u’ featuring Obongjayar.
fanclubwallet have dropped a new single from their upcoming EP Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines, following January’s ‘Band Like That’. Check it out below.
“‘Easy’ is all about growing pains. I had been thinking about my younger self, who was so debilitatingly shy, and wondering what she’d think about me now playing music on a stage in front of so many people,” the band’s Hannah Judge reflected in a statement. “It kind of bounces back and forth between me and the perspective of my younger self; contemplating the differences and wondering how things have changed as I’ve grown up. I think a lot of people wonder how their younger self would feel about them now. I think the chorus guitar swells on this song sound like a rusty swing set dug up from the past.”
Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines arrives March 29 via Cool Online.
Jane Weaver has released a new song, ‘Romantic Worlds’, alongside an accompanying video. The song appears on the singer-songwriter’s upcoming album Love in Constant Spectacle, which was previously previewed by the title track and ‘Perfect Storm’. Check out the Nick Farrimond-directed video below.
“I wanted to write a really over the top love song, it’s kind of tongue in cheek and about romance and brief encounters with a wonky synth,” Weaver explained in a statement. “It’s based on a ‘real life’ date after meeting online, how this changes from generation to generation and how romance is perceived now.”
Farrimond added: “Growing up watching the 80s Dungeons and Dragons, I was endlessly frustrated by the number of times the group nearly escaped back to the ‘real world’, only to be denied by that stupid unicorn. This video presented an opportunity to finally let the characters make their getaway. The ‘realm’ was one of my first forays into the world of AI. I was really happy with how it interpreted the footage and threw up some weird and wonderful results.”
TOPS’ Jane Penny has shared the new single ‘Wear You Out’, which will appear on her debut solo EP Surfacing. Following lead offering ‘Messages’, the track comes with a visual directed by OTIUM. Check it out below.
“I wanted to make something poppy and cute but also a bit sinister and weird, sensual and witty,” Penny explained in a statement. “Lots of wordplay, a bit dirty, I think the video represents the song well. Sometimes the greatest passion and the most intense love is slightly destructive and I wanted to explore that in a fun way.”
Discussing the new song, Tucker said in a statement:
“Paperclip Maximizer” is a cautionary tale about watching from afar as a former loved one pursues constant growth and career accolades with totalizing, universe collapsing abandon. The song is partly inspired by watching former pals pursue outwardly impressive music careers while absolutely trashing their private relationships. When I wrote it, I felt lonely and belittled in my attempts to articulate how my interactions with the music industry often left me feeling isolated, angry, and distressed. When I started trying to channel my frustrations into art, the songs that emerged were not simply critical of the artist’s experience but of capitalism as a system.
It’s kind of impossible to explain the song without coming across as a real dork but here goes: philosopher Nick Bostrom first described the paperclip maximizer in a 2003 thought experiment meant to illustrate how artificial general intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity. I find some of Bostrom’s thinking to be harmful and regressive (he is a proponent of longtermism, the latest garbage ideology that tech billionaires are trying to pass for moral integrity) but I really liked the metaphor, not as a statement about AI, but as a description of the destructive perils of capitalism, especially when its logic is internalized and recreated in our personal lives.
People seem to fear that new technologies will oppress and dehumanize even as we are already immiserating and exploiting one another with great efficiency. It’s like, if you think it’s scary that a machine might control you, wait til you hear about what human beings have been up to!
Best Friends Forever, a new festival taking place October 11-13 at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center, has announced its inaugural lineup. Focusing on emo, indie rock, and post-hardcore, the event will feature performances by Bright Eyes, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cap’n Jazz, the Dismemberment Plan, the Jesus Lizard, Built to Spill, JawBox, the Get Up Kids, the Murder City Devils, Karate, Rainer Maria, Mannequin Pussy, Fiddlehead, La Dispute, Sweet Pill, Pool Kids, Home Is Where, Everyone Asked About You, and more. Pre-sale tickets go on sale this Wednesday, February 28, at 10 am PST, with a general on-sale to follow on Thursday, February 29, at 10 am PST. Find more details here.
