Four Tet has teamed up with Ellie Goulding for a new single called ‘In My Dreams’. Check it out below.
“At the end of last year, Ellie texted me with a couple of voice notes for a song idea, words and melodies she was singing into her phone, and she asked me if I could use them to make something,” Kieran Hebden shared in a statement. “She’s told me in the past she likes to send me vocals that I can just use as sound and turn into whatever I want (which is how our song ‘Baby’ happened a few years ago). I found other noises to go with it and made ‘In My Dreams’. She added some new vocal parts, but we ended up keeping the voice note recordings as the main vocal. I guess the first take is often the most magical. I wanted to make something that was all about juxtaposing harsh, aggressive sound with the delicate and intimate.”
Back in 2014, Four Tet remixed Goulding’s hit ‘Burn’. In 2020, the UK pop singer joined the producer’s Sixteen Oceans track ‘Baby’.
Earlier this year, Hebden released his latest Four Tet album, Three. Goulding’s most recent album was 2020’s Brightest Blue.
Speaking about the track, the band’s Peter Brewis shared: “‘The Waitress of St. Louis’ is an ode to a lost place of sanctuary, Louis’ cafe in Sunderland, set to synthesised riffs, bouncing drums, and wiry guitars. Who or what is St. Louis’? The possessive apostrophe because it had been established by grandpa Louis over 100 years ago, and the unofficial canonisation because it was our place of congregation and a source of faith (in humanity as well as excellent coffee). We were privileged to have had a place like Louis’ in our lives but places like that rarely last as long as a lifetime – we see them disappear, leaving us with photographs and memories, looking for somewhere else to go.”
Sea Lemon – the moniker of Seattle singer-songwriter Natalie Lew – has teamed up with Death Cab for Cutie/The Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard for a new song called ‘Crystals’. Check it out below.
‘Crystals’ follows Sea Lemon’s debut 2023 EP Stop at Nothing. About the track, Lew said in a statement:
Crystals was written after I attempted “manifesting” for a good portion of 2023 and found myself feeling really lackluster about the whole process. I wrote most of the song after coming to this realization that “manifesting” or looking for signs in nature or everyday life is mostly just a coping mechanism to get by day to day. When Ben came on and wrote his verse, I loved his added angle—rather than attempting lighter coping mechanisms, just submitting oneself to being upset and living in that darkness for a while can be a way to cope in and of itself.
Ben’s contribution to this song is so exciting for me to say the least; as a huge Death Cab fan growing up, Ben’s songwriting has inspired me since I got interested in songwriting myself.
Nandi Rose has previewed her upcoming Half Waif album See You at the Maypolewith a new song called ‘The Museum’. It arrives on the heels of lead single ‘Figurine’. Check it out below.
“There’s a warehouse at the top of Main Street in my tiny town that’s being turned into a museum for Shaker art,” Rose explained in a statement. “It’s just down the road from my house, so I pass by it all the time. When I wrote ‘The Museum’, I was thinking about how sort of beautifully delusional it is to create a museum at a time when the world is reaching the apex of climate crisis. This idea of preserving pieces of furniture in a pristine, white-walled space when outside, everything is collapsing.”
“I’d also read a headline about how people were vacationing in Iceland at an active volcano, and that seemed to hold the same feeling for me as the museum-under-construction,” she continued. “Tourism at the brink of apocalypse. Meanwhile, my husband and I were talking about building a family, building a future, and I was grappling with the responsibility of what it means to bring a child into this kind of world — where people pose for selfies while the earth explodes.”
See You at the Maypole, the follow-up to 2021’s Mythopoetics, arrives on October 4 via ANTI-.
“This song came together when I was watching the Michael Jordan doc on Netflix,” John Ross explained in a statement. “I grew up an Orioles fan and the connection between Jordan and DMV sports just kinda happened on its own. It’s also kind of about how unrelaxing it is to watch TV and scroll on your phone. Super fun song to play live, def one of my favorites now.”
Dulling the Horns, the follow-up to 2022’s ILYSM, is due October 4 via Fire Talk. Last week, Wild Pink announced a new leg of their tour in support of the new LP, which includes a run of dates with MJ Lenderman. Find the band’s full itinerary below, too.
Wild Pink 2024-25 Tour Dates:
Oct 10 – Stockholm, SE – Slaktyrkan
Oct 11 – Oslo, SE – Belleville
Oct 12 – Copenhagen, DK – Stengade
Oct 13 – Berlin, DE – Badehaus
Oct 14 – Hamburg, DE – Aalhaus
Oct 16 – Cologne, DE – Blue Shell
Oct 17 – Rotterdam, NL – Left Of The Dial Festival
Oct 18 – Rotterdam, NL – Left Of The Dial Festival
Oct 19 – Utrecht, NL – EKKO
Oct 21 – London, UK – Moth Club
Oct 22 – Edinburgh, UK – Sneaky Pete’s
Oct 23 – Glasgow, UK – Mono
Oct 24 – Newcastle, UK – The Cluny
Oct 25 – Leeds, UK – Headrow House
Oct 26 – Bristol, UK – The Crofters Right
Nov 08 – Kingston, NY – Tubby’s –
Nov 09 – Buffalo, NY – Mohawk –
Nov 10 – Cleveland, OH – Beachland Tavern –
Nov 11 – Windsor, ON – The Meteor
Nov 12 – Kalamazoo, MI – Bells –
Nov 14 – Milwaukee, WI – XRay Arcade *
Nov 15 – Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle *
Nov 16 – Pittsburgh, PA – Pittsburgh Winery *
Nov 17 – Washington, DC – DC9 *
Nov 19 – Portland, ME – Space *
Nov 20 – Boston, MA – The Rockwell *
Nov 21 – Philadelphia, PA – Ukie Club *
Nov 22 – Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool *
Nov 23 – Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool %
Jan 29 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle $
Jan 30 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle $
Jan 31 – Athens, GA – 40 Watt $
Feb 1 – Birmingham, AL – Saturn $
Feb 2 – Oxford, MS – Proud Larry’s $
Feb 04 – New Orleans, LA – Tipitina’s $
Feb 05 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall $
Feb 06 – Austin, TX – Emo’s $
Feb 08 – Oklahoma City, OK – Beer City Music Hall $
Feb 10 – Santa Fe, NM – Tumble Root $
Feb 11 – Tuscon, AZ – 191 Toole $
Feb 13 – Los Angeles, CA – The Fonda Theatre $
Feb 14 – Los Angeles, CA – The Fonda Theatre $
Feb 15 – Santa Cruz, CA – Rio Theatre $
Feb 17 – San Francisco, CA – The Independent $
Feb 18 – San Francisco, CA – The Independent $
Feb 20 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall $
Feb 21 – Vancouver, BC – Rickshaw Theatre $
Feb 22 – Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre $
Feb 23 – Boise, ID – Shrine Social Club $
Feb 24 – Salt Lake City, UT – Soundwell $
Feb 26 – Fort Collins, CO – Aggie Theatre $
Feb 27 – Boulder, CO – Fox Theatre $
Feb 28 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre $
Mar 1 – Colorado Springs, CO – The Black Sheep $
Mar 3 – Lawrence, KS – The Bottleneck $
Mar 4 – Urbana, IL – Rose Bowl Tavern $
Mar 6 – Lexington, KY – The Green Lantern Bar $
Mar 7 – Lexington, KY – The Green Lantern Bar $
$ with MJ Lenderman
* with John Francis Flynn
% with The Natvral
– with Friendship
Cass McCombs has surprise-released Seed Cake on Leap Year, a collection of previously unreleased music recorded between 1999 and 2000. Out now digitally, with a physical release set for November 8, the album marks the singer-songwriter’s return to Domino, alongside last week’s reissues of 2002’s Not the Way EP, 2003’s A, and 2005’s PREfection. It contains ten tracks that were tracked at Jason Quever’s apartment at 924 Fulton in San Francisco while McCombs was living in Berkeley. Listen to it below, where you can also find new videos for the songs ‘Anchor Child’, ‘Baby’, and ‘I’ve Played This Song Before’.
My Brightest Diamond – the project of New York singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Shara Nova – has shared ‘Fight the Real Terror’, the title track from her forthcoming album Fight the Real Terror. The LP is out this Friday, September 13 via Western Vinyl, and like many of its songs, the title track was inspired by Sinéad O’Connor. Listen to it below.
“Fight the Real Terror is a question about activism, and about examining our vulnerabilities. I am not offering answers but a glimpse into these contemplations,” Nova said in an earlier statement about the album. “Writing quickly without orchestration forced me to be in the moment, focusing on structure rather than frill. I wrote & recorded a song a day in my home studio and rather than going back over to tweak, Tom Schick & I wanted to stay close to the unpolished emotion keeping the first drafts.”
Most recently, with Fragile Balance, Haiying Nie combines photography, environmental commentary, and material experimentation into a suggestive inquiry about nature and human intervention. In this last series, she uses photography not as a flat medium but as one that can be transformed. She first began to manipulate her images in a series of technicolor marine ecosystems, with her own process of layering and manipulating the layers of emulsion. The final pieces transcend their photographic origin, becoming almost tactile and multidimensional states of underwater turmoil. Through the intentional violation of the images’ slick surfaces, the works convey a vague voice of alarm and meditation on the related environmental devastation taking place in these tender, liquid landscapes.
What distinguishes Nie’s work is her ability to transform calm, nearly pastoral images of underwater life into mysteriously abstract places with seamless ease. The crumpled, shattered surfaces of the images are thus metaphors for the wreckage caused by human-induced climate change, pollution, and other threats. In manipulating her photographs in this way, Nie is not recording environmental decay but embodying it in the very physicality of her work. Sea anemones, jellyfish, and corals are therefore twisted from their bright and regular selves into becoming an unfamiliar and alien distortion of them. It is in this transformation to distortion that the audience begins to question their ability to contribute to the destruction of fragile environments.
Therefore, in Fragile Balance, it’s through the manipulation of light and color that Nie grasps this emotional beauty and underpinning vulnerability, both tied to these ecosystems. The vivid colors were used in such a way that they created tension between being enigmatic with admiration for the beauty of the subject matter and discomfort from its distortion. Manipulation of the emulsion surfaces further engages the viewer into the tactile qualities, offering an experience that is purely sensory and not only based on observation. The visual and emotional interface that the work of Nie allows for implores us to feel the effect of environmental degradation from the inside.
Surely what Nie does goes deeper: with her help, the outlook on reality for us is shaken, and in her best works, she raises some important questions about our interaction with nature. She symbolically cracks the clarity of her photographs, breaking the illusion of a perfect, unharmed world full of hurt. Her work is at the same time a metaphor for and an injunction to all who see it to reflect on matters of extreme urgency in terms of preservation and our role in the ongoing story of environmental conservation.
