London band Fresh have dropped ‘Merch Girl’, the first single from their upcoming EP of the same name, which is out April 19 via Get Better and Specialist Subject. Take a listen below.
“‘Merch Girl’ is about living in that space between wanting something and achieving something,” the band explained in a press release. “It’s kind of a character song, about somebody that is involved in music – but not in the way that they want to be, and they’re frustrated by that. At the beginning of the song, they’re watching from the sidelines, but as the song progresses they make the decision to create their own art. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, drawing from clichés of the wallflower, the sidekick, but ultimately it’s empowering and a reflection on the ways that we come into our own as women artists.”
Bodega have put out a new track titled ‘Cultural Consumer III’, taken from their upcoming album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life – ouy April 12 on Chrysalis. It comes with a video directed by Luca Balser, who also helmed the clips for previous singles ‘Tarkovski’ and ‘City is Taken’. Watch and listen below.
“The ‘cultural consumer’ is a character who has become essential to my songwriting for BODEGA,” vocalist Ben Hozie explained, “‘Cultural Consumer I’ was the first song I wrote where I feel like I found the songwriting voice for the band and the ‘cultural consumer’ showed up in the first BODEGA single ‘How Did This Happen?!’ in 2018. The cultural consumer is a middle class bohemian who is addicted to studying culture (both high art and pop culture) and is thus oppressed by it.”
“In ‘Cultural Consumer III’ he has become a new ager who is blasting a killer curated playlist in his car on the way to the airport to fly to a meditation retreat in Taiwan,” Hozie added. “Despite all of his consuming and questing for self-help, unlike Bob Dylan, he has never once ‘gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.’ He is just buying crap.”
Hannah Pruzinsky, who makes music as h. pruz, has released a new song called ‘Dawn’. It’s lifted from their upcoming debut LP No Glory, which is out next week and includes the recently released single ‘I Keep Changing’. Check it out below.
“‘Dawn’ intends to capture that transition point between utter naive infatuation and falling into trusting a person,” Pruzinsky explained in a statement. “That in-between ‘point’ of love seems to be more of a dragging ellipsis for me. I initially wanted to play with space and silence in this song to underline that, but then the instrumental chorus became just as full of longing and doubt as any words or space.”
Brooklyn-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Malini Sridharan has announced her third album, Tombeaux. Featuring production from Julia Holter, the record is set to arrive on May 17 through Birdwatcher Records. It was recorded by Lorenzo Wolff at Restoration Sound. Check out the lead single ‘Charon’ below, and scroll down for the album artwork and tracklist.
Tombeaux Cover Artwork:
Tombeaux Tracklist:
1. Mote
2. Rooftops
3. Charon
4. Plains
5. Rivers
6. Down to Me
7. Beam
Beyoncé has unveiled the official album artwork for her upcoming album, Cowboy Carter, which is due March 29. She also shared a lengthy statement about the Renaissance follow-up, addressing the success of its first two singles, ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ and ’16 Carriages’. “This ain’t a Country album,” she said. “This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” Check out the album cover and read the full statement below.
TODAY MARKS THE 10-DAY COUNTDOWN TO THE RELEASE OF act ii. THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART TO ALL OF THE SUPPORTERS OF TEXAS HOLD ‘EM AND 16 CARRIAGES. I FEEL HONORED TO BE THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN WITH THE NUMBER ONE SINGLE ON THE HOT COUNTRY SONGS CHART. THAT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT THE OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT FROM EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU. MY HOPE IS THAT YEARS FROM NOW, THE MENTION OF AN ARTIST’S RACE, AS IT RELATES TO RELEASING GENRES OF MUSIC, WILL BE IRRELEVANT.
THIS ALBUM HAS BEEN OVER FIVE YEARS IN THE MAKING. IT WAS BORN OUT OF AN EXPERIENCE THAT I HAD YEARS AGO WHEN I DID NOT FEEL WELCOMED… AND IT WAS VERY CLEAR THAT I WASN’T. BUT, BECAUSE OF THAT EXPERIENCE, I DID A DEEPER DIVE INTO THE HISTORY OF COUNTRY MUSIC AND STUDIED OUR RICH MUSICAL ARCHIVE. IT FEELS GOOD TO SEE HOW MUSIC CAN UNITE SO MANY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD, WHILE ALSO AMPLIFYING THE VOICES OF SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE DEDICATED SO MUCH OF THEIR LIVES EDUCATING ON OUR MUSICAL HISTORY.
THE CRITICISMS I FACED WHEN I FIRST ENTERED THIS GENRE FORCED ME TO PROPEL PAST THE LIMITATIONS THAT WERE PUT ON ME. act ii IS A RESULT OF CHALLENGING MYSELF, AND TAKING MY TIME TO BEND AND BLEND GENRES TOGETHER TO CREATE THIS BODY OF WORK.
I HAVE A FEW SURPRISES ON THE ALBUM, AND HAVE COLLABORATED WITH SOME BRILLIANT ARTISTS WHO I DEEPLY RESPECT. I HOPE THAT YOU CAN HEAR MY HEART AND SOUL, AND ALL THE LOVE AND PASSION THAT I POURED INTO EVERY DETAIL AND EVERY SOUND.
I FOCUSED ON THIS ALBUM AS A CONTINUATION OF RENAISSANCE… I HOPE THIS MUSIC IS AN EXPERIENCE, CREATING ANOTHER JOURNEY WHERE YOU CANB CLOSE YOUR EYES, START FROM THE BEGINNING AND NEVER STOP.
THIS AIN’T A COUNTRY ALBUM, THIS IS A “BEYONCÉ” ALBUM. THIS IS act ii COWBOY CARTER, AND I AM PROUD TO SHARE IT WITH Y’ALL!
John Grant has announced a new album called The Art of the Lie. The former Czars member’s follow-up to 2021’s Boy From Michigan is set for release on June 14 via Bella Union. Along with the announcement, he’s unveiled the new song ‘It’s a Bitch’, which you can hear below.
“It was a blast making this track which is just about having fun with words, synths and dope rhythms and bass lines and also making fun of post-COVID malaise,” Grant said of ‘It’s a Bitch’ in a statement. “Plus, people get to ponder what a ‘hesher’ is. I loved going to the arcade in the 80s and watching smokin’-hot heshers hold court while playing Tempest, Stargate, Robotron and Asteroids, and while also blasting Iron Maiden and Rush on their Walkmans.”
Grant made The Art of the Lie with producer Ivor Guest. It features contributions from Dave Okumu of the Invisible, Robin Mullarkey, Seb Rochford, and Rachel Sermanni. “We could often only work for two weeks at a time, it was so intense,” Grant recalled. “Ivor assembled a team of incredible musicians. Dave Okumu [from The Invisible] is such an incredible guitar player. He came into the room when we were playing the demo of ‘Father’ and just immediately started doing what you hear on the record. Robin Mullarkey played fretless bass and blew my mind, and the very talented Seb Rochford was on drum detail. There were a lot of moments of magic from everyone.”
“The first time I heard ‘Time It’s Time’, the last song on The Colour of Spring by Talk Talk; or ‘The Night of the Swallow’ by Kate Bush, on The Dreaming; or some of Jane Siberry’s material on The Speckless Sky or anything by Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance; those were important moments for me in music,” Grant added. “And of course there is a bit of the Devo spirit in everything I do in some way or another. There’s a lot of amazing humour in their music but they were also serious as a heart attack. I guess this is one of the important themes in my life; it’s about moments and being able to recognize them and be in them while they are happening in spite of whatever else is going on. It’s being in a taxi, the most normal situation in the world and seeing the grandeur, the sheer weight and majesty of a big city passing by, staring in awe. The absurdity of the world on the outside juxtaposed with the world taking place on the inside. That fascinates me, the ability to capture what it really feels like to be a human.”
The album title alludes to Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, which Grant said is “now seen by MAGA disciples as just another book of the Bible and Trump himself as a messiah sent from heaven. Because, God wants you to be rich.” He elaborated:
This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies. For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation. They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.
The Art of the Lie Cover Artwork:
The Art of the Lie Tracklist:
1. All That School For Nothing
2. Marbles
3. Father
4. Mother And Son
5. Twistin Scriptures
6. Meek AF
7. It’s A Bitch
8. Daddy
9. The Child Catcher
10. Laura Lou
11. Zeitgeist
Lightning Bug have released a new single, ‘Opus’, lifted from their forthcoming album No Paradise. Following lead outing ‘December Song’, the track comes paired with an animated video entirely hand-drawn by the band’s Dane Hagen, with color and backgrounds by Melanie Kleid, and based on a ghost story written by singer Audrey Kang. Watch and listen below.
“We imagined ‘Opus’ as a dystopian folk song written for a post-apocalyptic fantasy saga,” the band explained in a press release. “Or maybe it’s for the saga we’re all living in, as every year our humanity resigns itself to a world turning faster towards destruction.”
Maggie Rogers has shared ‘So Sick Of Dreaming’, a new single from her forthcoming album Don’t Forget Me. It follows the previously unveiled title track. Check it out below.
Don’t Forget Me, the follow-up to 2022’s Surrender, will be released on April 12 via Polydor.
Vocalist/guitarist Dylan Baldi had this to say about the new track in a statement :”I got pretty obsessed with the band Earth during the pandemic, and that led to an obsession with other doom metal, and then I started buying lots of fuzz pedals and downloading distortion plugins online—basically just anything that would blow out my guitar sound and get it sounding somewhere in the deep and fuzzed out ballpark of the heavy music I was listening to. ‘I’d Get Along’ is sort of a Cloud Nothings take on that sound, where the guitar is big and bulky but there’s a really poppy vocal melody on top, and the drums are bouncy and rolling around the other instruments in their own idiosyncratic way.”
