Snõõper have put out a new single called ‘Company Car’. It marks the Nashville outfit’s first new music since the release of their debut album, Super Snõõper, earlier this year. Listen to it below.
Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with Snõõper.
Lynks has released a new song, ‘(What Did You Expect From) Sex With A Stranger’. It follows the recently shared singles ‘USE IT OR LOSE IT’ and ‘NEW BOYFRIEND’. Listen to it below.
“Now, Grindr can be a wonderful thing – don’t get me wrong,” Lynks said in a statement about the track. “But I wrote this song during a time when I was using Grindr almost like TikTok or Instagram; as a way to distract myself from reality – to not be alone with my thoughts. And, unsurprisingly, the sex that came from that wasn’t hugely fulfilling. I was seeking these encounters to try and distract myself from the mundanity of life, but ultimately leaving them feeling no different. I wanted to try and capture that weird oxymoron; sex without feeling, romance in a coma. What does sex become when it’s devoid of emotion? Transactional? Routine? Obligatory? Compulsive? It’s a funny idea. And one I hadn’t really heard put to music before. So I thought I’d better do it! And shout out the Docklands Light Railway in the process.”
Another Sky have announced a new album, Beach Day, which is set for release on March 1 via Republic/Fiction. It includes the previously unveiled singles ‘Psychopath’, ‘A Feeling’, ‘Burn the Way’, and ‘Uh Oh!’, and today, they’ve shared the song ‘Aimee Caught A Moth’, which does not appear on the album. Check it out below.
“We weren’t sure exactly how to announce the record,” vocalist Catrin Vincent said in a statement. “It felt like it needed more than words. And we’ve already released plenty of songs from it. So we gift to you a B-side, ‘Aimee Caught A Moth’. This was one of the songs that fell through the net but one we still love. It’s a very literal song written in the depths of lockdown, when my flatmate Aimee caught and released a moth from a cobweb. It felt incredibly significant and songworthy. Aimee is an incredible person and deserves a song.”
Talking about the LP, Vincent added: “We thought we’d finished our second record back in 2019 when we released I Slept on the Floor. But time is a complicated beast. And in the depths of lockdown, a completely new vision arose, one that we all knew we needed to follow instead. That vision was Beach Day. It’s a story about moving through personal winters and finding the light. It’s about acknowledging your whole self; your shadow side, your anger, your sadness… and learning to love those parts of yourself in order to move through it. We hope you can hear the beginnings of transformation in it.”
Revisit our Artist Spotlight interview with Another Sky.
Beach Day Cover Artwork:
Beach Day Tracklist:
1. Beach Day
2. The Pain
3. A Feeling
4. Uh Oh!
5. I Never Had Control
6. Death Of The Author
7. Burn The Way
8. Psychopath
9. Playground
10. City Drones
11. I Caught On Fire
12. Star Roaming
13. Swirling Smoke
The kettlebell is one of the most versatile pieces of equipment you could have, and that’s exactly what makes it ideal for at-home training. It offers unique challenges compared to the dumbbell due to its uneven weight distribution, which manages to make it more difficult to control as you pull, press, or swing. Additionally, kettlebells do tend to challenge the strength of your core and grip, making them ideal for athletes who want to get into strength training.
In this article, we’re going to talk about and introduce you to some simple yet effective kettlebell exercises that you can do in the comfort of your home. Hopefully, you will find these useful now as the weather grows colder and we’re all more reluctant to go to the gym for all of our workouts.
The great thing about kettlebells is that they can be used for both endurance and strength training, depending on what kind of workout you want to have on any given day. That’s why some of the exercises we will be discussing below are more focused on muscle-building, while others will have your heart pumping in minutes. Ideally, if you want to have the best of both worlds, you can get different types of kettlebells (various weights) so that you can do all these moves in one session.
The goblet squat is an essential lower-body movement that you can do with a kettlebell at home, and it’s extremely effective at targeting the muscles in your legs, specifically the hamstrings and the glutes. Depending on the intensity of your session, you can choose to do it with a lighter kettlebell or with a heavier one – if you’re going for muscle-building, choose the second one, and if you just want to get your heart racing, you can opt for more reps and speed, as opposed to weight.
It is a standout exercise for developing strength in the shoulder and for ensuring that both of your shoulders get the same kind of muscle development. This is a particularly useful move for those who have any kind of muscle imbalances that they need to work on as it trains the muscles in each arm separately. Furthermore, it’s a move that also targets core stability and balance, which is key if you want to be doing functional work.
If you have enough space to walk around, the farmer’s carry is a fantastic, easy-to-do exercise that works the core and helps you improve balance and stability. Typically, you have to do it while holding a heavier set of kettlebells in each arm, and it’s recommended that you try to walk longer distances to increase difficulty and to get your heart racing.
The kettlebell swing is surely the most popular and best-known kettlebell movement in the fitness world. It’s a move that focuses on your entire body as it engages both your upper and lower muscle groups. Along with that, it’s a dynamic exercise that can be done with speed and thus can get the blood pumping, making it an ideal pick for a HIIT session or a functional fitness one. To perform it properly, you have to thrust your hips up aggressively so that the kettlebell goes up – all of that without actively using the force in your arms. However, it’s vital to squeeze your butt at the top before lowering the hips back down and doing another rep.
This move works the muscles in your back, including your lats and rhomboids, and it also engages your biceps. It’s important to remember that this is an exercise for building strength, so it should be done slowly and with controlled motion – swinging your arms should be avoided, and it’s also a good tip to use heavier weights.
Another lower body exercise that can easily be done with kettlebells at home. The Reverse lunge is a terrific, unilateral move that targets the glutes and the quads while also getting your heart rate up and making you break a sweat. It can be done with light weights for many reps or with lower reps but with heavy weights, depending on your goal with the workout.
This move is designed to target the muscle in the back of your upper arms or the so-called triceps. It’s important that when you attempt this exercise, you engage your core, and you don’t arch your back, as that can lead to lower back issues. The key here is to remember to extend your arms completely at the top, as that’s the only way to work your triceps through the full range of motion. This is a move that should be done with slowed and controlled motion, as you don’t want to be rushing through it and potentially performing it with incorrect form.
Hopefully, by the end of this article, you got inspired to get some kettlebells for your home and start training. As you can see, kettlebell exercises are an extremely easy yet effective way to spice up your home workouts and make them much more engaging and difficult for you. They offer a different and unique challenge compared to barbells, dumbbells, or exercise machines, and so they’re much more suitable for those of you who want to do functional fitness and are interested in more dynamic ways to train the body.
Longtime Killing Joke member Martin ‘Youth’ Glover has posted a eulogy for his late bandmate Geordie Walker, who passed away over the weekend. “Still in shock and hard to believe he is no longer with us,” he wrote. “Always seemed indestructible to me. Bullets bounced off him. He was truly destined to be. No man was cooler than Geordie, one of the very best and most influential guitarists ever.”
Youth continued:
He was like Lee Van Cleef meets Terry Thomas via Noel Coward. Very charming, inscrutable and gracious, with a gentle effortless touch, ( both on the guitar and making you feel welcome) that is, when he wasn’t shredding you with his razor sharp articulate shrapnel. He was a virtuoso gunslinger, both with his music and verbosity. He wouldn’t hesitate to throw his flicknife into the mixing desk and demand a two bar count, not four, for his drop in, which always managed to focus the engineers attention !
He understood that the chemistry was the rub and that’s actually where the magic and soul was ….in the conflict.
He was my teacher, partner and at times a terrifying foe.
Eternally grateful for the stars colliding that brought our fates together.
He is now flying high with The Valkyrie’s, on his way to the halls of Valhalla, where his seat at the table of legends is most certainly assured.
He defined a generation or three with his genius.
I am personally honoured and privileged to have served with him and share a vision with him of what the band could become and then see it go way way beyond that and what any of us could have imagined.
Thinking of his family, mother and loved ones, band mates, all the fans, gatherers and many musicians he has influenced with his visionary playing and writing.
Honour The Fire
KJ4ever
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Real Estate have announced their new album, Daniel, which is set for release on February 23 via Domino. Lead single ‘Water Underground’ arrives today with a video inspired by the 1990s Nickelodeon sitcom The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The clip was directed by Edmond Hawkins and stars the show’s Danny Tamberelli and Michael C. Maronna. Check it out and find the LP’s details below.
Martin Courtney, Alex Bleeker, Matt Kallman, Julian Lynch, and Sammi Niss recorded the follow-up to 2020’s The Main Thing at Nashville’s RCA Studio A with producer Daniel Tashian. According to a press release, they named the album Daniel “simply because it seemed like a good idea to bestow a human name upon a record. Was it for Daniel Tashian? Maybe. Was it the sign of a band that has now been around long enough to take its music seriously without taking itself or its perception too seriously? Absolutely.”
“This song is about writing songs,” Courtney said of ‘Water Underground’ in a statement. “I think ‘Water Underground’ is like the unconscious, the mysterious part of your brain where creativity comes from. The constant flow of music in the back of your head. You get an idea while driving or walking the dog or something and you want to hold on to it.”
“New Jersey roots are hard to break,” Tamberelli commented. “Julian, Alex and Martin all grew up one town away from me and were actually friends with the younger siblings of my friends from Ridgewood. They told me they even saw me perform at the local bandshell with some of those older siblings while I was in high school. The video brings it full circle and adding my dear old friends from the show into the fold really tied it all together.”
Daniel Cover Artwork:
Daniel Tracklist:
1. Somebody New
2. Haunted World
3. Water Underground
4. Flowers
5. Interior
6. Freeze Brain
7. Say No More
8. Airdrop
9. Victoria
10. Market Street
11. You Are Here
Villagers and Lisa Hannigan have joined forces for a cover of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’. Listen to their rendition of the Christmas classic below.
“Since I was a little boy this song by Katherine Kennicott Davis has captured my imagination more than any other Christmas carol,” Villagers’ Conor O’Brien shared in a statement. “Such a dream to perform it alongside the incomparable voice of Lisa Hannigan.”
Villagers released their most recent album, Fever Dreams, in 2021.
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 best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have Björk’s beautifully exuberant new song with Rosalía, ‘Oral’, which brings together strings, flutes, and a ‘90s dancehall-inspired beat, with proceeds helping to combat open net-pen fish farming in Iceland; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s lush, tender new single ‘Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You’, which did not appear on his album of the same name and was recorded with a different group of collaborators; and ‘sleepy’, a hauntingly evocative collaboration with Midwife from body / negative’s upcoming LP.
Best New Songs: November 27, 2023
Song of the Week: Björk and Rosalía, ‘Oral’
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, ‘Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You’
body / negative feat. Midwife, ‘sleepy’
Peter Gabriel has released ‘Live and Let Live’, the final song on his new album i/o, which is officially out on December 1. He’s been rolling it out since the beginning of the year, and all tracks on the LP – Gabriel’s first collection of original material in 21 years – are now streaming. Check out ‘Live and Let Live’ Bright-Side Mix and Dark-Side Mix below.
Speaking about the single, Gabriel said in a statement:
Music can be like a box of mood pills that we can use to treat ourselves and a lot of the work of the Reverberation project is focused on that sort of idea. When someone suggested that forgiveness might be a topic to write about, at first, I thought, ‘that’s not interesting to me,’ but then I remembered two things. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the chair of The Elders and a real mentor for me, led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and that really allowed people to expose, report and maybe feel again some of the horrors of the apartheid era. I remember he always said that listening made a huge difference, just making sure people felt heard and recognized. Then, sometimes, it created a space for forgiveness.
There’s also a description that Nelson Mandela gave when he was released from jail after 27 years in prison and found himself about to become president of South Africa, standing next to some of the people who’d been responsible for keeping him in jail all that time. He said he felt some of the old fear and hatred swelling up inside him but when he thought hard about it, he realized that he needed to find a way to work with these people, to build what he called his rainbow coalition. He needed to feel their humanity and ultimately to find a way to forgive them. He was quite sure that if he couldn’t forgive them and find a way to work with them, that he would remain their prisoner for the rest of his days.
Now, I know if we look at what’s happening in the Middle East now or in Ukraine, all sorts of places around the world where there’s still violence and brutality, to walk around with a bunch of flowers, preaching forgiveness seems trite and pathetic, maybe. But in the long run, I think people have to find a way. ‘Peace only happens when you respect the rights of others’ is a quote from the Peace University in Costa Rica and I think that’s a really important message for me and for my life. You either belong to that hurt or you free yourself and forgiveness is clearly a super effective way of freeing yourself.
Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker has died at the age of 64. His bandmates confirmed the news on Instagram, writing: “It is with extreme sadness we confirm that at 6:30am on 26th November 2023 in Prague, Killing Joke’s legendary guitarist Kevin ‘Geordie’ Walker passed away after suffering a stroke, he was surrounded by family. We are devastated. Rest In Peace brother.”
Born in 1958, Walker was one of only two constant members of the legendary post-punk band, alongside singer Jaz Coleman. He joined the band in 1979 after responding to an advertisement Coleman placed in Melody Maker, which read: “Want to be part of the Killing Joke? We mean it man. Total exploitation, total publicity, total anonymity. Bass and lead wanted.”
”I’d just moved to London and I saw an ad in Melody Maker, I don’t know, but I liked the sound of it, it looked rather serious, fanatical, I don’t know what it was but it clicked with me,” Walker told Music UK magazine in 1984. “So I went down to see this guy and immediately started arguing with him about his taste in music and whatever, and I kept in touch and kept hassling them for some reason. I think it was the intensity of the argument I liked.”
After putting out their first EP, Turn to Red, in 1979, Killing Joke released their self-titled debut album the following year. From day one, their goal was to “create a musical renaissance via a strict musical form,” Coleman told Uncut in 2018. “That’s what I wrote in my diary in 1979. No guitar solos, no blues except in parody, no Americanisms. We talked endlessly about things like, what is an English rhythm? We didn’t have a folk tradition to draw from. Killing Joke was rediscovering the tradition.”
Killing Joke’s run in the 1980s spanned seven studio albums, including 1981’s What’s THIS For…! and 1982’s Revelations. Around that time, Walker joined Coleman in moving to Reykjavik, Iceland over concerns about the apocalypse. In 1985, the band released Night Time, featuring the hit singles ‘Love Like Blood’ and ‘Eighties’, the latter of which has been likened to Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ riff. Gang of Four’s Andy Gill produced their self-titled 2003 album, which featured Dave Grohl on drums. The band’s most recent collection was last year’s Lord of Chaos EP, and they released the single ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ in March.
“For millions of people around the world, Geordie was the guitarist and main songwriter of Killing Joke, a rock band of legendary dimensions,” his close friend Luca Signorelli wrote in a eulogy to Walker. “Metallica’s cover of 1980 KJ song ‘The Wait’ introduced the band and Geordie’s guitar work to at least two new generations, but I hate to think of Geordie going down in history because of that. Jimmy Page (THAT Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin’s fame) considered Geordie one of the finest guitar players ever.”
“But I don’t want to celebrate Geordie because he was a ‘guitarists’ guitarist’ Killing Joke, the band he spearheaded through four decades of successes and crises, it’s still one of the most influential ever,” Signorelli continued. “But others will certainly talk about Geordie’s musical record better than I could ever do. None of this really matters to me now. What I want to remember is that Geordie was, for 40 years, the closest friend and most important person I’ve ever had outside my family.”
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